This Preganancy is Bullcrap

I take the streetcar home sometimes when I'm feeling claustrophobic about the subway. Windows that look out on more than just animated charcoal gray tunnel walls are probably the most underrated aspect of the streetcar. I mean, they're slow, and they hold up traffic at the worst times but at least you can see the sun. At least you know that if it breaks down you won't be trapped in the city's dripping underbelly. I like streetcars, ok?

I took the streetcar home today. I have this pet peeve involving public transit. I don't like it when people talk as if they were sitting in their living room and not as if they were sharing a vehicle with a collection of grumpy passengers. I don't like it when people bare their souls or talk about their medical history or their criminal record or anything else I would never ask you about until we were at least on a first name basis. This lady who struck up a conversation with her neighbour about menopause one time, for example. This is an example of inappropriate subway talk.

So I'm on the streetcar today and it is maybe six o'clock at night heading east which means downtown has emptied all at once into this very streetcar but luckily I manage to grab a seat near the back, mainly by keeping my head down and not making eye contact with anyone with gray hair and I have my book out, On the Road by Kerouac because I figure if I'm ever going to do this road trip thing I might as well read about The Seminal Road Trip, but it turns out I don't like Kerouac as much as I thought I would, or maybe I just don't like the character of Sal Paradise but then they are one and the same right? So anyway I'm busy trying to force myself to read this slim little book that I've been working on for almost a month now when I start picking up snippets of other people's conversations and I try not listen because listening in on other people's conversations is rude, right, but when you do it on a crowded streetcar you are pretty much saying hey fellow passengers I hope you find my life as fascinating as I do because you are about to spend the next half an hour learning all about me. This is the unwritten contract you sign every time you say something on the bus guys.

There were two teenage girls at the very back. Neither could have been more than fourteen, maybe fifteen if their voices told me anything. At first to hear them talk, they liked to talk you see, I wanted to laugh, because it was like they were actively trying to out-white trash each other. These are people you won't often find sitting next to you introduction to cinema studies or your second year philosophy lecture. White trash Toronto is not a place I actively seek out. I'll bike through when I have to but that's about it.

But these girls weren't funny. They were depressing. Their lives, so much of them left to play out, were essentially over. These were not kids who would graduate high school or get degrees or have respectable, steady jobs and invest for retirement or whatever else it is your supposed to do when you have money. I don't want to sound all determinist, oh these poor kids never had a chance it's not their fault whatever they do now. But did they ever really have a real shot?

One of the girls was pregnant. Pregnant! Five months into it and she was just a baby herself, you know? Teenage pregnancy is cruel joke. I can sit here and be all shocked about it because I never knew any one who forgot to keep it wrapped and I grew up in one of those wonderful white neighbourhoods where nothing bad ever happens and you never see police cars parked outside peoples' houses because there is never any reason for them to be here.

It all seems so unfair. Those girls will never get to explore their potential, not while they're so wrapped up in the ephemeral manufactured drama that they seem to think is just another necessary part of life. Don't worry, I know I'm a condescending jackass. Who the hell am I to feel sorry for them. Maybe they'd feel just as sorry for me if they took a look at my life. I don't know. I do know that those girls have no real future beyond failed relationships and unwanted children and dead end careers. That one girl, the pregnant one, how will that child do any better? It's an ugly, ugly circle. She said, referring to the pains that come from carrying a child, "This pregnancy is bullcrap". Why are we capable of having children at such inappropriate ages? Why is it that simply by virtue of being stupid enough to let some punk kid go bareback (don't worry I'll pull out before it happens) she suddenly becomes capable of raising a human life? I feel sorry for that unborn kid more than anything and the more I think about the life he or she will live the more I think that that life has already been set.

Tell me I'm an elitist prick please. Tell me that children born to fourteen year old kids turn out just as well as children from normal families and that your socioeconomic condition has nothing to do with the education you will one day receive or the jail cell you will one day inhabit or not, please. Tell me this please because otherwise what does that say about any of us. We can't just be a product of how much money our parents had lying around while raising us. There's more to it than that. I really hope there is, at least.

Halpern