Cliffy’s critics in this thread, I’m afraid, don’t understand the peculiar plight of DC residents like him and myself and many other Dopers. I also knew this thread would be about DC because it’s Cherry Blossom season and I think DC residents have reason to gripe more about tourists than other cities do.
See, when people visit New York or Chicago or L.A., they see themselves as visiting a living, breathing city with busy people who have high-powered jobs in tall buildings. Yes, there are tourist attractions, but people still think of where they’re going as a city that happens to contain those things. Hell, the bustling, hurried pace of New York is one of the very reasons people go there in the first place.
Not so with Washington, D.C. Many people who come here just see the place as one big-ass museum, there for their enjoyment because, by gum, they’re a taxpayer and they paid for it. They forget that there are people who live here, who work here, who raise families here. Not only do the tourists act like they own the place; they actually think they do.
I have many friends who work on the Hill as legislative aides or reporters and they encounter this attitude all the time. People seem to think that all the people with badges roaming the Capitol are automatons like the kind you’d see in the Hall of Presidents at Disneyland. Or they just see them as something abstract – “bureaucrats” or “the media.” This is not the case. 99 percent of them are just regular people trying to do regular jobs to pay for their regular lives. And it’d be nice if people would respect that.
Maybe Cliffy did overreact. But I can sympathize with the steady, boiling cauldron of rage that’s probably been growing in him for months now.
Can’t a guy let off some steam without the PC police cracking down on him?
It’s not like Cliffy is an anti-rural one-trick pony who cracks off at people in rural states every thread, and it’s not like he works anti-rural snipes into every other posts, and it’s not like he’s seriously advocating a “most rural people are idiots” platform. Normally, I’m all for not over-generalizing, but when it’s done for comedic effect in an obviously hyperbolic rant, who the fuck cares?
I’ve made my share of faux passes when touristing – it’s endemic. The problem was not that he didn’t know what the hell he was doing; lots of people don’t know what they’re doing on the Metro. The problem was his selfishness and ignorance were putting me at direct risk of real pain (I had one of those gates clock my knee about two months ago and I quite literally did limp for a week; it’s not entirely healed yet.) Moreover, instead of apologizing for blocking traffic as I have done when I’ve made similar mistakes and as have 99% of the other people I’ve seen do the same, he stopped, tried to push me back into the gate, threatened to have me arrested, and (if I’m any judge) would certainly have tried to beat me up if a police officer hadn’t been standing nearby. Had I been able to retreat, I would have retreated, but first he blocked my path, and then he got in front of me as I tried to walk away. I don’t think I should have to condone that behavior, and if you had been there, Robot, I’m reasonably certain you’d have wished he’d experienced some consequence more corrective than being told by the officer to move along, secure in the illusion that he had behaved like a civilized human being. In the cold light of day the ideal would have been for the officer to give the asshole a dressing down, but after you threaten me, I think I may be forgiven for not feeling rationally disposed to your well being. There’s little I can abide less than the unjust claiming the mantle of justice. When I make a mistake I try to admit it, I don’t try to have the victims arrested.
Yes, I was painting with an overly broad brush. The vast majority of tourists from rural areas handle their urban experiences with aplomb. (As I like to think I did when I was a kid from Ohio visiting Our Nation’s Capital.) But the most charitable thing I can think is this asshole freaked out on me beause he thought I was going to steal his wallet. When he saw that he was in the wrong, he should have apologized, not ratcheted the situation higher. Obviously, not every tourist, from whatever regaion, is stupid, illiterate, or a poor dresser. But in my direct experience, this guy was all of those things. (I excised the paragraph about how he couldn’t read the Metro instructions despite the fact that they’re printed in about 15 different places – the build-up was already long enough.)
Re: turnstyle: :smack: I even knew as I was writing it that it looked incorrect. And I know what a stile is. Blame it on the apoplexy.
Hey Cliffy!
I’ve done went up there to D.C. and rode that underground train a buncha’ times. We’re comin’ back on that train from Champs late one night,(and who ever heard of a bar like Champs runnin’ out of Crown Royal, but that’s another story) and this good ol’ girl from Texas, name o’ Jeanine, she stands up in the front of the crowded car and hollers out:
“Look at all the happy people on the happy Metro! Look at all the smiling faces!”
Now, of course, me and this good ol’ girl from North Carolina I was with and the cute couple from Florida and Larry and Renee, the two coon-asses from Louisiana that was with us, we all laughed. But all y’all from around them parts, well, y’all just kept on starin’ at the floor. Sure did.
So Jeanine says, “C’mon! Let’s see a SMILE! Of course, us that was with her smiled, but all y’all from around them parts just kept starin’ at the floor.
So Jeanine hollers out, “Is everybody happy? Fuckin’ A!” And all of us laughed, but all y’all from around D.C. just kept starin’ at the floor.
So next mornin’ we’re all eatin’ breakfast at the restaurant in the Crystal City Gateway (that’s a big hotel, if ya’ didn’t know) and lookin’ around the restaurant, the people at most of the tables are laughin’ and talkin’ like most folks do, except at one table three guys are sittin’ there starin’ at their eggs and not sayin’ nothin’.
So that Larry, from Louisiana, he pulls a hundred dollar bill out of his wallet and lays it on the table and says, “Bet anybody a hunnert dollar dem sourpuss at dat table over dere are D.C. boy.” (He said it that way, ‘cause that’s how Cajuns talk)
But Peggy, from Florida, says, “You coon-ass, you’re tryin’ to bet on a sure thing. Ever’ body knows them people that stares down and don’t never smile lives around these parts.”
So Larry didn’t get to win no money.
Next day, ridin’ back to Atlanta on the airplane, Jeanine asks me, “How long you reckon’ them folks around D.C. would last back where we live?”
All of us on that-there airplane figgered y’all wouldn’t make it one day out in the country, without at least getting’ yo’ ass whipped, or maybe shot. Y’all just too damn ignorant about how things work and stuff.
Me, I like goin’ up there to my Nation’s Capitol. Been there five or six times now and always got along fine. Trick is, don’t try to smile or speak to them folks that lives there. They ain’t had no trainin’ in manners and the other finer things in life, like how to smile.
I don’t mind a little good-humored mocking. Blowing off steam? No problem. But to be so incensed over a misunderstanding that you wish you’d done far worse than the original accusation is over the line. It’s not like the officer slapped the cuffs on before things got straightened out. How put out, how inconvenienced was Cliffy, really?
I’ve been to D.C. many times. I know it well. Last summer, for my birthday, I decided to travel down for the day and go to the new annex of the Air and Space Museum at Dulles Airport. I’d seen about half the museum, and was having lunch when an announcement came over the P.A. that the whole place was being evacuated. Protestors had poured ashes over the nose of the Enola Gay, and not knowing what was in those ashes, they cleared everyone out to be safe. At first, they said they weren’t going to reopen that day, but they did after about two hours. I didn’t get to see as much as I wanted before they closed in the evening.
With the airfare and all, I spent more than $100. I was annoyed with the protestors, but I didn’t come in here and speak of the joys of slitting them from groin to gullet. See the difference?
(On preview, I have no trouble believing that the other guy was a jerk. But I don’t get too upset about baseless threats (like being arrested when I haven’t done anything wrong). I also like to let the punishment fit the crime, and the OP came off as a major over-reaction.)
But see, he did get the best of me! I don’t pretend differently. He behaved inexcusably and suffered no adverse consequences. I played by the rules and was threatend with injury, arrest, and violence. I can neither get back at the goon nor even explain to him why he was in the wrong, which is what I hoped to do at the time but was too tongue-tied to accomplish. What I can do is blow off steam on the Internet. It’s actually quite cathartic.
I think I’m gonna stop trying to justify myself after this (but it’s the internet, so who knows?). But I really think I can be forgiven for having a momentary flash of anger at someone who behaved so poorly. Robot is implicitly asking me to analyze the situation rationally. But I did analyze it rationally – my hindbrain was telling me to slug the guy, but that didn’t happen. But when people mistreat you, you don’t get mad? Then I guess you’re a better person than I and every other human being I’ve ever met.
I’ve read the CityPaper enough to know that cops aren’t always rational – and I was living here when that guy got murdered while spending one day in jail for unpaid parking tickets because they put him in Gen. Pop. No, I wasn’t terribly inconvenienced as it turned out, but I don’t think anyone else who has posted to this thread would have gotten out of there without their fight or flight reflex kicking in – at least not if they remembered that story. And yet Robot chastises me for it. Well, you can’t please everyone, I guess.
I may have overreacted myself, but from my experience you should feel very lucky. I spent a while as a bouncer. You admitted you pushed his pansy ass out of the way. You also admitted you put his hands on his shoulders. Putting your hands on someone and pushing them is battery. That’s how I called it as a bouncer, that’s what every cop I called put it down as, and that’s what every judge at every trial I testified at called it. You can try to sneak by, you can even shout “Hey asshole watch it”. But going on the “I had to push him out of the way” strategy doesn’t work very often. If you had done that in my bar I’d have called the cops on your ass.
“I didn’t throw the first punch” doesn’t fly with many cops and judges. You raise your hands to the guy and shove, and you instigated the fight. The law isn’t like high school first punch is irrelevant. Don’t start shoving, or you will go down. You are seriously lucky the cop was apathetic.
While I sympathise with the OP, I think he was wrong in using his hands. He should have shouldered the asshole aside and then just kept on walking without a backward glance. And if the asshole had a problem with that… well, let him use his hands, if he has the cojones.
Well, that was the original plan, but he had blocked my forward progress and started pushing me back into the gate, so I had to escalate my response.
Here’s a picture I found on the net. It’s not a great angle, but it’s the best I could find. The brown barriers that make up the lane and contain the card-reading machinery are what I was trapped in. There is no opportunity to sneak by when someone stands in the middle of the lane, wolfman, and the “Excuse me!” which was my first attempt to get him out of my way failed to work. Did you read the paragraph where he started to push me back? You can see that I had nowhere to go – not forward, not to the sides, not back (where the gate had closed). And yet, here he was, pushing me backwards. What else would you have me do? What option did I have to avoid injury? If you suggest something that you can develop here in the cold light of day when you have as much time as you’d like to think about it instead of being in imminent danger of some hulking behemoth tripping you over something and knocking you to the floor, I’d be happy to put it in play next time an idiot tourist blocks people’s Metro access. Well?
