News that makes you go, “Huh.”
It’s one of those weeks where the news doesn’t make sense to me. Beginning with Hillary Rodham Clinton’s emailgate.
Apparently, Hillary preferred to use the email account created for her rather than the account that was handed her when she became secretary of state. And this is worse than anything any state secretary has ever done, including lying to get us into wars. It’s worse than Michelle Obama not covering her head in Saudi Arabia.
Meanwhile, Rep. Don Young,
R-Alaska, suggested that importing grey wolves into a congressional district would end that district’s homeless problem. He didn’t mean it the way that it sounds, but just the fact that he said it at all makes me go, “Huh.”
What he meant, I think, was that we shouldn’t protect grey wolves. We should go back to shooting them whenever we see them, because otherwise they’ll hunt down and eat our precious homeless people, whom he cares so deeply about, as he uses their plight to emphasize his point that grey wolves are bad.
In reality, grey wolves have never significantly impacted homeless herd populations in Alaska. Instead, the main cause of decline has been due to the hard winters and the poor foraging opportunities.
Closer to home, King County Metro is looking to hire a bathroom czar.
See, you can’t find bathrooms in this city. By you, I mean you, and you and you, and me, not just drivers. But Metro is going to hire somebody for $97K a year to look for bathrooms that Metro drivers can use.
Let me try to coax some rationality out of this information. You have an entity, King County Metro, which is a public utility. Your public utility, in fact. My public utility. Uncle Fred’s public utility. Recently, the people in charge of this public utility were stunned to learn that the drivers of the buses they arrange to serve us do not have sufficient places “to go.” Moreover, that they have to have sufficient places “to go,” as is required by law.
What would a real public utility do when faced with such facts? Wouldn’t a real public utility immediately think of the public welfare?
Not only their legal obligation to take care of the needs of their drivers, but also the need for public toilets for all of the public? Wouldn’t a public utility, as such, being public, being a utility, naturally approach the problem of the bathroom shortage by seeking a system-wide solution to the public problem? Wouldn’t it seek to expand its mission to include the creation of public facilities that would solve the problem not only for its drivers but for the entire public?
Not this public utility.
This public utility will just pay someone to go door-to-door across city blocks where bus routes end and beg business owners to please let bus drivers on break use their restrooms.
I’m surprised Metro didn’t consider just supplying drivers with really big jars.
By the way, this is the same public utility that maintains the sewer system and waste water treatment for this area.
That’s what it did before it took over the buses. That’s still a big part of what it does. So it’s not like it doesn’t know its way around a toilet. It’s not like it doesn’t know how to lay pipes.
Why don’t we do with the police what we’ve done with public amenities? Police are too expensive, and nowadays it isn’t just upstanding middle and upper classes expecting police to serve them, but, gasp, poor people. So we should do away with the police to save money.
Then, down the road 20 or 30 years, when crime gets out of hand and bus drivers sue for protection, the city could pay someone thousands of dollars a year to organize neighborhood watches along bus routes.
The “bus driver safety czar” could organize consciousness-raising programs to get the public on board, so we’d all care about our bus drivers’ vulnerability to crime.
Sound off to Dr. Wes: [email protected]
Correction in next week's paper:
When Dr. Wes wrote Metro maintained the sewer system and waste water treatment for the area, he got the timeline wrong. The sewage side of Metro was absorbed by the county's Department of Natural Resources more than a decade ago. We regret the error.