When I came home from work this morning, I saw two people waiting at the bus stop near my work. Like usual, I walked past the stop and as I looked back I saw one of the bus people go out into the street to look for the arriving bus. I was tired and didn’t even think about what I had been working on the past 24 hours; the bus operators had gone on strike at midnight.

I walked over to them and informed them about the strike. They weren’t happy because they hadn’t heard the strike went official and both were going to be very late for work.

Yesterday, on a whim, I decided to go ahead and get an errand done that involved me taking the bus. While waiting at one of the stops an old man reminded me the strike was possible. As soon as he told me, I started figuring out what other things I might need to get done before the buses shut down. A trip that should have taken 3 hours ultimately stretched out to 7.

I had a lot of time to think about the strike and the impact it would have on my fellow citizens. I realized a part of the reason the strike was happening was that the people impacted by the strike weren’t the people negotiating the strike. No news, other than 30 second blurbs, talked about the strike. For the past week I saw stories about a woman building an artificial leg with Legos, dogs being rescued, cats being rescued, too many stories about shootings, stabbings and other crimes.

Kind of a side note that fits into the theme of this article. On the latest episode of The Newsroom, one of the news staff is trying to convince the executive producer that the OWS story is legitimate, but she continues to think of it as a joke and a non-story. It isn’t until he points out that her inconvenience of having to walk to work in her $1500 pair of shoes is exactly the disconnect the OWS people are trying to shake off in the minds of the public does she grudgingly decided to let him continue to research the story.

While the bus strike is at its heart a labor dispute, I think it illustrates something fundamentally disturbing about the economic divide we are experiencing. The people I see when riding public transportation day to day are forgotten people. They are the 30+ year old McDonalds worker who has to work two jobs to come close to having a living wage. It’s the pregnant teen heading off to a neonatal class by herself because the father of her child is absent either by choice or is in jail. I see people tattooed so much that there is no way they will ever get a job that will move them up the corporate ladder. I see the woman with two kids, threadbare clothes on her back, a fresh tattoo on her breast covered with a fresh bandage and a smartphone tucked away in her cleavage. She acts more like a big sister to her kids than a mother.

Now, if it isn’t the summer you’ll see college students on the metro system and when there are big events downtown you will see regular people tepidly take public transportation, but you will never see the well to do tax base take the public system. You’ll never see a reporter or politician or pundit rely on public transportation as their singular means of travel. It allows for a disconnection of the situation so that when labor disputes come up there is little sympathy for the strikers and little thought about those stranded. The official website of the metro system actually suggests people look for carpools to get places. If they had bothered to actually take public transportation they would know a majority of people obviously take public transit because they don’t have access to transportation either personally or through a friend, plus most people are focused on their smartphones and have headphones on when traveling so they don’t even communicate with fellow travelers to have an extended network if something were to go wrong. Just like the people I saw this morning, I’m sure there were quite a number of people who didn’t know the strike was going on, because of the ‘massive’ one day coverage the news gave to the story.

What hasn’t surprised me, which in and of itself is surprising, is the reaction to the strike by the public. I know it isn’t scientific to use comment pages as examples, when I see the same anger coming from the public it’s a little disturbing to me. During Black Friday last year, when talk of work slowdowns happening by barely above minimum wage workers at WalMart, there were a good number of the public who thought the best thing to do was to fire the ungrateful workers and give the job to ‘people who would be grateful for the jobs.’ The same sentiment was heard a few days ago when fast food workers in a number of cities went on a one day strike demanding hirer wages. The public, at least a vocal majority of the public, had the sentiment that those ungrateful workers should be fired and deserving people should be given their jobs.

The same language is being written on comment pages about this bus strike. A large portion of the public feels the striking bus drivers should be fired outright and the jobs given to people who essentially will be so grateful they will take any money offered to them. Even the people who work in the same service jobs as the bus drivers, the same people who have menial jobs and make menial wages are willing to be as ruthless as employers and are willing to fire someone who isn’t thankful and groveling to keep a job that has terrible working conditions.

A good majority of Americans are working jobs that pay the bare minimum of wages relative to what a company makes but we have been conditioned to believe we should be thankful for the meager scraps of pay we receive. If we complain, if we speak out very few people will have our back. In fact, the sentiment of most is if you talk out of line you should be cast out, no questions asked. In the meantime, improvement in our condition would, in most cases, cause minor adjustments to corporations. Last year, the owner of Papa John’s famously mentioned how Obamacare was going to hurt his business. The cost analysis showed the adjusted cost of Obamacare would as $0.15 to the price of each pizza sold. Meanwhile, the man lived in a huge mansion in Florida and hosted a fundraiser for Romney. The strike that fast food workers had on Monday was for the workers to get a raise coming close to $15 an hour. When people hear those numbers they go crazy because they think the salary is outrageous, but a study showed that to offer that salary the price of an average fast food meal would have to be raised by a dollar. Now, understand that would be a raise of a dollar if the companies wanted to keep the billions in profits they make every quarter. If the head CEOs gave up maybe a few millions in profits, they could compensate workers with a living wage and not have to pass the cost to the public and still have a healthy profit.

The public is upset with the bus drivers, and their only thought is to get to work. Every little slight they’ve seen with a driver is magnified, so of course with prodding from management the drivers are painted as overweight, lazy, ungrateful union sleazes who should be fired. There is a larger picture here and many in the public fail to see that low wages are hurting all of us. We don’t have the personal money to make ends meet and we resent those who we believe have it easy. We are willing to lash out at people who are right in saying the enemy isn’t us but are the fat cats in the ivory towers who are making millions and billions off of our work while we get crumbs. Those that could shine a light on the plight of the working poor don’t have a clue as to the struggle faced by them, so they either take the Rush Limbaugh approach and condemn them all as ungrateful miscreants, or they are treated like an archeological artifact that is fascinating but is so out of place in their mind that they are emotionally detached from their struggle.