The New York Subway system is one of the scariest places to be in NYC.
Last week, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg announced an investigation into the death of 30-year-old Jordan Neely who died from “compression of neck (chokehold)” after another passenger subdued him.
Over the weekend, protestors marched in the streets and others climbed down and blocked the subway tracks.
But, reporter Emma Vigeland shared that the desire to feel safe on public transit is “bourgeois.”
Vigeland said on the Majority Report podcast, “I was hit, at one point, sitting on the subway by a man who was having a mental health episode. He sat next to me and he was kind of elbowing and kind of flailing around….and he hit me in my face and in my body….and it was jarring…right?!”
“The idea that I would want him to be hurt, in any…I just didn’t want to be near him in that moment because I understood something was going on here.”
“Every one of us who has taken public transit has had this kind of situation…something similar happen…seeing someone struggling…that doesn’t mean that our fear, in that instance…and I was a little scared…I was hit.”
“But, like, my fear is not like the primary…primary object of what we should be focusing on right now. It’s the fact that that person is in pain. And so, like, the politics of dehumanization, privileges, the bourgeois kind of concern of people’s immediate discomfort in this narrow, narrow instance, as opposed to larger humanity and life, it’s really freakin twisted.”
Emma Vigeland on the Majority Report today says that the desire to feel safe on public transit is bourgeois and explains how one time she suppressed those bourgeois feelings when she was assaulted on the subway by a mentally ill vagrant, as everyone should pic.twitter.com/YNqg5r7trW
— Ed Gentry 🛶☀️ (@SunnyMarmalaid) May 4, 2023
In recent months, as violence on New York’s MTA has escalated, Vigeland has countless examples of the “narrow, narrow” incidents in which New Yorkers might react just a little too “bourgeois” for her taste.
