Dear Anonymous Transit Worker:

So I see that you are unsatisfied with simply inconveniencing the public (particularly whoever needed that ambulance I saw stuck in traffic yesterday) and now you feel the need to deface public property as well:

Let me explain some words to you. There is freedom of speech. There is artistic expression. And then there is vandalism. Now, I have occasionally seen graffiti that has such a certain style, panache, or powerful message that it's hard to put it into the third. With yours, however, there is no doubt. This is vandalism and you are a vandal. But hey, what's one more infraction of the rule of law, eh?

I have been hesitant to flat-out condemn you strikers; the wages and benefit package you have sound quite frankly more generous than mine, and I am able to live perfectly comfortably, even treating myself to occasional luxuries, but then I am also skeptical of the Metropolitan Transit Authority - they cry poverty every time they go to raise the fares, but then what's up with this surplus - and I don't really know what your jobs (or lives) are like - and I've heard the phrase "Crabs in a bucket", and it tends to spring to mind anytime I find myself getting critical somebody for doing a little better than I am.

But y'know, I dropped those tiny shreds of tolerance and sympathy around miles 5.5 and 6 (guesstimating) of my 7-plus mile walk home tonight - right when I spotted these little messages you left for all of us commuters to see as we patiently wend our ways from point A to point B and back again.

Note - All 3 were left on a waist-high wall that runs along the Ocean Avenue side of Prospect Park.

P.s. - note to the rest of the world - the bus thing I wrote about in "transit strike day 2" didn't work out so well going home. I could have tried but I walked out of my office tonight to find bumper to bumper traffic, moving at a slow crawl. I thought about how long it took me to get to work (about an hour and 45 minutes), and how long it was likely to take me to walk home (slightly over 2 hours, it was 2.5 last night and that was with much picturetaking). With the traffic looking as bad as it did, I had a feeling it might take me at least that long to get home on the bus, possibly even longer, and frankly given the options of spending 2 hours either walking, or waiting in the freezing cold for a bus then sitting in traffic, I will almost always pick the walk.

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