On Transportation and Crazies

It probably is a relatively common occurrence on long-range travel services (in this case Greyhound Bus) that a mentally handicapped person disrupts the travel.

I say this because I travelled by Greyhound, and an elderly Mrs. Robinson kept walking up the aisle from her seat because “she had things to do” in “her home” — from what anyone can gather the most specific chore she had in mind was “making the bed”, which consisted of trying to drag the legs of a teenage girl who was lying across two seats, largely sleeping.

She had to be carted back to her seat several times. Eventually, a plan was devised to stop her at the outset, and all hubdrub was cornered off to the back of the bus. She should have been riding with somebody, but she wasn’t. Failing that, someone should have been there at her destination, someone making it a point to get there early for their mentally handicapped friend, but, alas, nobody was.

I am reminded of the shooting of the mentally handicapped man who was shot by air-marshals recently. A sad case, and my first thought was “Well, you probably can’t blame the air marshals.” My opinion has shifted a bit based on new and troubling information. (Apparently, he was running away from the marshals, for one, and for another he never uttered that he had a “bomb”.) Nonetheless, assume the best of the air marshals. I still found a few troubling aspects about the reaction of various pundits and opinion-meisters. There was some reportings on the incident as though nothing bad happened — nothing terribly off about a mental handicapped shot down. Anyone who half-joked “Well, that thins out the herd” (as I heard on one radio station) — Phooey on You.

On the Greyhound Bus trip, the man next to me joked that perhaps she was just shipped out to a random location by her caretakers that were sick of her. He immediately made a caveat apologia, “That would be mean.” My father, an ex-social worker, relayed an actual incident where something like this happened, a Mexican woman wanting to go to “Washington” to meet the Government because she was being chased by the Mexican government. She wound up in Central Washington, the only logic being that this has a heavy Mexican population and thus some Spanish speaking caretakers would more likely be available than somewhere else.

I assume the disruptive mentally infeebled elderly woman made it fine. Social workers were called in to the Tacoma Greyhound station. At least she wasn’t shot to death, although in the darkest recesses of many on the bus as she tested everybody’s patience, she was surely mentally killed.

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