Image: buses in 1950s Paris—standing room only here, but the passengers can at least get off at the back.
In a crowded bus, giving up your seat for someone else does not reduce the number of people who are standing; nor does it increase the number of people who are sitting. So, why would you do it?
The reasons seem obvious, if a young, fit person gives up their seat to someone who is disabled, elderly, pregnant. In Paris, the rule has been that priority is granted to mutilés de guerre, the war-wounded, who carried an authorisation that allowed them to claim, not a courtesy, but a legal right.
Image: copyright free.
Where the custom remains a courtesy, and not a right or duty, it is at least feasible that an elderly man might concede his seat to a young girl. Perhaps to a young, blind girl. The pecking order for bus seats isn’t everywhere as clearly regulated as it used to be in Paris.
My art master at school once boarded a crowded bus of schoolboys and evicted one of them from his seat with the words, “You stand up and let me sit next to this ravishing young lady.” The ravishing young lady was embarrassed and said nothing, nor did the rest of us, who still grinned cheekily at Alan Clark’s cheek, nestled, as it by then was, up to hers.
But, suppose a posse of old men entered a bus and told those in the front seats that they needed to vacate those seats and find a perch elsewhere on the conveyance? And then moved to the middle section to advise those who’d settled there that their seats were needed and they were to move to the back of the bus? And then approached the rear of the vehicle and ordered the folk there to vacate those seats as well? Where, then, would the bus’s initial occupants go to? And what right would the bus’s invaders have, to order such evacuation of the vehicle? What if the passengers appealed to the driver, only to find that the driver had changed and was no longer the man at the wheel when they had started their journey? “How will we get to our work? How will we get home? What about our livelihoods? Who is it who will come and take our places on the bus? Will they be deserving of our courtesy, demanded though that courtesy now be? And will there ever be a bus for us again?”
“We needed to eliminate your driver,” comes the reply. “Your driver was our enemy, and so we have replaced the driver, and now we will replace you, because we can. For, although replacing the driver was our aim, if we can succeed in that, we can remove you from our sight as well, and this we want, because this bus is ours and always has been. You must disembark from the bus, and how you get to work and how you get home and what happens to your livelihoods does not concern us. Not in the slightest. This bus is now ours.”
Image: Bezalel Smotrich. Copyright free.