North Charleston, SC- State Representative David Mack surprised me by showing up for a
Hungryneck Straphangers Bus with Us Transit Ride at the Mary Street Transit center on Friday, Oct. 3, 2014 at 6 am. David hadn’t RSVPd and the routes we had scheduled for the morning didn’t run through much of his district. It was still dark. David and Sue Edward, a long shot Green Party candidate for the SC house, talked to transit riders under the bleary lighting of the parking garage until the #301 St. Andrews Bus pushed out of the predawn gloom and into the light. My stalweart accomplice in Nerdy, AV club activism, Dave Crossley, a green party member, also wrote off two hours of sleep to join us.
The #301 ground through the West Side of Charleston and David patiently talked to one rider after another. Despite years of desperate effort, many of the riders still weren’t registered to vote. Some of them clearly weren’t interested in the process of democracy. David still patiently listened to each person’s complaints, bantered with the Green party folks and tried to make democracy work on the darkened bus.
By the Time we got to Citadel Mall, the sky had grayed with the coming of day. Here were a mix of Express Bus, Local and Tri County Link riders, mostly coming in from the South end of the County to begin a long day of work downtown or in North Charleston. Again David handed out cards, offered the encouragement and help his status as a member of the SC Legislature could afford regardless of where the rider came from, their status as a voter, their race or their economic status. He seemed to enjoy and value each encounter.
After a long visit at the busy Citadel Mall Stop, we boarded the Northbridge bus to go to N. Charleston, it rapidly filled and David greeted and attempted to talk to each rider.
Not everyone wanted to talk. Some looked at him, but wouldn’t pull the earbuds out of their head to speak to a senior member of the SC House whose record of fighting for the downtrodden is rock solid. Other’s knew little of Government and couldn’t grasp who David was since he wasn’t Barack Obama or James Clyburn. I was embarrassed and ashamed for both he and the Green party candidates. We had never done a ride on Friday, which I knew to be a poor day for a ride. I had set this up to try to push some of the other Candidates into getting on the bus. Several of them never did. It’s hard out there. People are angry. It’s easier to lose while safely staying inside the bubble. We have a list of those who took a ride.
David was out of the bubble. Sometimes it worked and there was laughter. The rusting gears of our corroded democracy turned a little. The thing I like most about transit is the reality that those on board are on good days, a community. I remember clearly the prayers and good wishes shouted after me into the night as I faced the long, dark walk to the hospital to see my wife last fall when I stepped off the #40 at Bowman Road. They prayed to God on my wife’s behalf the way some of them talked to David Mack, as if the almighty might not listen unless they did it loud.
But David Mack is not God. He can’t force the Governor to extend Medicaid to the 300 thousand people Nikki Haley robbed of access to a clinic or a doctor. He can’t bring back the home healthcare workers who relieved elderly parents of the massive burden of bathing their severely disabled adult children which they used to get once a week. David can’t make the toxins the Governor allows industry to pour into our groundwater disappear. He can’t take the lead out of the rivers. He can’t raise the children who have been beaten to death while DSS laid off hundreds of social workers from the dead. On a bad day, David couldn’t even get now convicted Speaker of the House Bobby Harrell to recognize him so he could speak in the SC Statehouse.
On those very bad days David and the members of the Democratic Caucus were forced to sit in silence. The Speaker of the House, now convicted of campaign finance corruption and stripped of the most powerful position in the State Legislature, forced them to listen to hours of speeches by tea party representatives attacking the President. On those bad days, nobody listened to David Mack.
David, I and the Green Party people reached Superstop in North Charleston and made the short, scary dash across Rivers Avenue at rush hour to get on the #10 Rivers Ave. bus for the ride back to where we started, about six miles.
The mighty 10 is the backbone of our underfunded local CARTA transit system. It is a monument to what human determination can accomplish. It is a chain of buses, some now 19 years old with millions of miles on the Odometer which moves over 97,709 passengers in September 2014. Many of its buses were purchased for use at the Atlanta Olympics. Others are five year old rewards from the recovery act which President Obama used to kick start an economy in cardiac arrest. One is a new diesel, hydraulic hybrid bus which pushes off after each stop on the strength of air pressurized from braking energy captured as is slowed down. 45 thousand pounds of bus, carrying 60 riders, runs for a moment on thin air.
The 10 is the only bus line in an area of half a million people where you can generally say that another bus will be along in 15 minutes. It links our poorest, most desperate areas where you can’t find a job or a grocery store to the low paying service jobs in tourism and the medical sector downtown. It runs through part of David’s district.
Friday morning had been a poor time for a ride. Obviously tourism was down for the weekend and far fewer housekeepers and cooks had gotten a text to come into work from North Charleston. What we were left with was a light load of people, some on public assistance, some with nowhere particular to go. Some had lost their minds.
It was a lady who had lost her mind who sat down to talk to David on the 10. David smiled and listened minute after minute. My horror at the reality of what I was seeing overwhelmed me. I doubted this woman would vote. If she did, there was no telling who she would vote for. She had an overwhelming set of problems. She was sick, poor and marginally homeless. She could find more mercy to help her stay off the street than men in a society increasingly applying lifeboat rules to who suffers sometimes are. She had been couch surfing with relatives. She had eaten. She had lots of complaints, mixed up with problems and confusion which seemed to mean nothing at all.
David was listening to her like she was a winner of the Nobel Prize. It went on and on. This wasn’t the purpose for which I got out of bed at 5 am that morning. People need to connect. They need to vote. The willingness to stand up as a citizen is being beaten out of them, one disaster at a time. This woman was one of the victims who offers the struggle ahead nothing more than the burden that extending mercy to her from a ravaged storehouse of public support will cost. She was one of the “costs we need to squeeze out of the system” which the Governor is so happy to talk to the business community about. “Out of the system” means to allow her to die as soon and as cheaply as possible, like the 1000 people who will be killed by lack of access to Medicaid in SC this year will.
I was depressed. Even on the shabby hilltop on which we SC progressives are surrounded, David’s time, attention and energy is still a precious resource. I watched it being lavished on this hopeless suffering women which God has inexplicably abandoned to struggle in our miserable state. It was not “a great day in South Carolina.” David, however, continued to hang on her every word the way some politicians attend to fundraising reports.
As the bus pulled into Charleston and the crowd on board began to thin, I looked around. I realized everyone had been silent for several minutes. As they rose from their seats to dismount I looked at the nurses, housekeepers, dishwashers and construction workers who make my city possible for 8 dollars an hour. They had quietly surrendered their opportunity to speak to a member of the legislature so this women could have it.
As I looked around, trying to pay attention the way David had been, I realized the other passengers had all been listening to the entire exchange. They had watched their legislator, the Hon. David Mack (D) North Charleston, patiently absorb the chaos and incoherence of the woman’s stream of consciousness. They had proof that David would listen to the poor woman, long and patiently, and were confident that when they had something to say, that he would listen to them.
I remembered the admonition of our Lord, that whatever you do to the least of these, you do to me. It’s the power God has given to us all, the hardest one to use. David was using that power. In the long book of life inscribed in heaven, he’s solidly ahead in the polls.