403 Miles of Systems

Systems. That’s the big word this year, the one nobody seems to stop talking about. In class after class, we’re asked to speak about what systems affect us, which systems are visible and which are not, and what a system is. To define a system, a lot of my classmates turned to the examples of the prison system or the credit system. All these things that make people generally unhappy. I can’t speak for the world, but I’m going to go out on a limb and say that as people we don’t like feeling unhappy. We like positive systems that distract us from the negative ones and just make us feel good. For me that’s the regional rail train system.

The regional rail is just some trains. That’s really it. You get on and you get off some time later, surprisingly far from your initial location for how much you paid. I’m less interested with how it gets you where you’re going, and more concerned with the experience. I’m not sure what exactly about it I love but there’s just something meditative and calming about it. As you leave the city, you can see the urban area slowly fade and become more green; turning into a series of small towns and eventually farms and rural areas. To think that people take this ride 360,000 times each day is insane to me.  For me, it’s a calming and infrequent experience but for others, it’s their boring or stressful daily routine.

The really interesting thing with this example, though, is that it can be applied as a metaphor to any number of systems.  When one person sees a just means of protecting citizens from criminals, another sees as a flawed institution that harms minorities and prevents past felons from living a comfortable life. How a system affects the individual directly correlates to how that system is perceived. When I think of systems I think of the regional rail because it positively affects me in a way different than it affects many others. Some people like it because it gets them to work in the morning, (more often than not people hate it because it gets them to work in the morning), some people hate it because the trains usually aren’t the most punctual or clean. The majority of people, though, just don’t think about it.

When was the last time you sat down and thought to yourself, “How does the regional rail make me feel?” It’s a strange question, no doubt, but it’s also one that not many people have an immediate full answer to. The thing about SEPTA, and many other systems actually, is that they’re either not present in someone’s life at all, or all too present and the individual is just normalized to the experience. This happens a lot with systems - good or bad - all the time. Of course we don’t notice this because, well, that’s the point. Since 1976 the US government has executed 1,427 people for a criminal offense and we’re just cool with that? I mean, of course we’re not, but it’s become normalized to a point where we don’t even realize it’s scale. This example is especially true in states like Texas, where more than a third of these executions have occured.

But we don’t think about that on the regional rail because the regional rail is for peace of mind and enjoying nature go by. The regional rail is for getting your ticket after you’ve gotten on the train so you get one of the big tickets that they punch a bunch of holes in. It’s like an unintentional anti-system system. It’s this 403 mile web of steel tracks and cars going roughly 100 miles per hour, all communicating with each other over invisible waves in the air and I sit myself down and don’t exist for a few hours. It’s cathartic.