For most of my life here in Halifax, I have been involved in work that has sought to include persons living on the margins in to the common life of the city.
One of the most difficult barriers to overcome has been neighbourhoods, principally the way communities often band together to oppose difference when it arrives on their doorstep.
Whether it is a group home, a recovery centre, a social club made up of persons living with a mental illness or, God forbid, persons who have been released from prison, the moment such an initiative is announced the parents have borrowed that favourite expression of Helen Lovejoy, “Won’t someone please think of the children.”
NIMBY (Not In My Back Yard) is a pervasive response to difference in most of our Halifax neighbourhoods. Thus, it is near impossible to experience diversity and difference in community.
The urban exception to this rule continues to be public transit. If you want to meet and talk to persons who don’t look like you, talk like you, have experiences that are different than yours, all that is required is to stand at a bus stop with the exact change of $2.25 and let the adventure begin (It’s $3.25 if you are taking the #330 Metro X from Tantallon).
As an ordained minister I qualify for a travel allowance, I would be reimbursed on a per-kilometre basis. But, instead, I use a bus pass. The bus gets me everywhere I need to go; it gets me there faster than driving my car.
How is this?
First, if the bus is late it’s late for the same reason your drive to your destination will make you late as well, that reason being traffic.
I don’t have to search for a parking spot, I can walk from the bus to the house, hospital or residence I am visiting without doubling back from a distant parking garage.
I also walk quickly, so I can get where I need to go with little fuss, with plenty of exercise and offering a ‘green’ witness for how to live with care for our planet.
I return to the most important reason I ride the bus. Living in community with persons who are different than us does many things.
First and foremost, we all have a tendency to assume our problems are the biggest and most troubling of all. Putting our life in perspective, hearing and seeing the challenges of others, enables me to understand my life in context.
Second, watching and hearing persons with limited resources find delight and joy without many of the material securities middle class people like me assume we need to be happy, is a wonderful life lesson.
Third, some of the individuals I have met on the bus are among the most interesting people I have met in my life. I remember the woman who showed me a photo on her phone of her pet snake Boris; the man who travelled to every bridge game in Halifax-Dartmouth and told me that every location offered its own unique, generous community; and the man who sang for me the song he had written to his daughter who had been taken away from him many years ago, then showing me photos of their reunion.
I do not listen to my iPod when I am on the bus; I don’t want to miss a thing. Bus travel is efficient, cost effective, it’s good for the environment, wonderful for community spirit and a source of fun and deep conversation.
If you have never taken the bus, you don’t know what you are missing.
Kevin Little is an ordained minister and outreach worker who rides the #330 Metro X, the #1, the #23 and the #52 buses every weekday to do his work and meet new people.