Future breadwinner and citizen

Another troubling occurrence in my Observatory of Human Behavior: On the el this morning, two young women took seats in front of me. I didn’t pay attention at first, but the one who did most of the talking became a subject in my observatory. Her voice sounded as though she were pre-adolescent, though her companion appeared much older. Between the inevitable cell phone calls and her witty comments to her friend, I came to think that her emotional age matched that of her voice. The train’s destination signs were wrong on the front car, though the other cars’ signs were correct. In this situation, the train operator has to announce the correct line and destination at each stop to correct inevitable confusion among riders. After the second time or so, the talker in front of me asked, “Why don’t they just change the signs?” It doesn’t require a whole lot of time on the CTA to discover that equipment malfunctions frequently, especially the destination signs. As we traveled, I discovered from the virtual monologue of the young woman that she is a college student, apparently at DePaul. DePaul is a respected university. She complained that her psychology class wasn’t at all what she expected. She’s studying marketing and thought the class would help her in the psychology of marketing. Instead it was geared towards supervising. To her, utterly unimportant information. Future Manager From Hell in gestation! She just can’t keep her eyes open in class. Nor could she keep her eyes open in a class on multiculturalism. “Purple Line to the Loop,” the operator gamely announced yet another time, when we arrived at Merchandise Mart. “This is the Loop, Dumb Ass!” said the wise one. Uh, no. The Loop, not synonymous with “downtown Chicago,” is bounded by the el tracks in a, well, loop (Lake Street on the north, Wabash on the east, Van Buren on the south and Wells on the west). The next stop put us in the Loop. I suppressed the surprisingly mild urge to correct her, maybe because I feared that it would have been wasted breath. What would it take to shift her paradigm? Yet another person being “educated,” to what effect? I do tremble to think that if something way less than rocket science blows by a person, what kind of footprint on the earth will that person leave?