SCENE: Commuter bus to Logan Airport, Sunday 7:48 a.m., a couple dozen passengers and one Jovial Driver. He is an older gent, looks like Einstein with a crew cut. He’s been complaining entertainingly since we boarded. Massachusetts drivers! This bizarrely warm autumn! Unspecified politicians! His one-man show gradually turns into a two-hander with Tough Cookie, a brass-blonde woman of about my age; they toss the dialogue back and forth like they’ve been practicing.

JD: The world’s gone crazy, you know? Crazy. You ever see the Three Stooges? Crazy like that.

TC: Crazy. Never mind the Stooges. We should go back to The Waltons.

JD: Mayberry RFD, that’s what we should go back to. That was the way it should be.

ME: (silently to myself, eyes closed, trying to be asleep) … um, didn’t that take place before civil rights…?

JD: (warming to his subject) It’s crazy. Now the government tells us they’re doing a great thing with all this Narcan. Telling families, we did you a favor, we revived your kid. If someone wants to overdose, I say, let them!

TC: Yeah! If they wanna die!

ME: (jaw dropping, eyes popping, still silent as early morning brain struggles for adequate words to argue this cruelty)

JD: And now they’re taking such gooood care of all these Mass and Cass people [a Boston flashpoint encampment of unhoused people] but they’ll just destroy everything they’re given, they’ll just take and take and —

ME: (stops searching for kind teaching words) I WOULD REALLY LIKE NOT TO HAVE TO LISTEN TO THIS.

BUS: (Silence. Sweet, golden, sullen silence. For the entire rest of the trip.)

Maybe I missed an opportunity to connect, educate. Even if those two wouldn’t have heard me, maybe someone else on the bus was open to what I might have said in a better moment. Maybe I was just rude. A snowflake.

Maybe shutting that sh*t down is enough of a message. Enough of an example to other nice polite white folks. Enough defense of anyone on the bus whose life has been touched by the pain those two were callously dismissing.

So many maybes. Bottom line, though, I’m sitting here now at the airport remembering something I say to encourage myself sometimes:

Maybe standing up doesn’t change anything out there in the world.

But it changes whether I’m someone who stands up.

At least there’s that.

Onwards.