Wednesday, is midweek. The suffocating, dangerous heat dome prevailing upon outdoor activity for the last day or so has receded. It is possible to move about again, to enjoy the most basic of our animal-like freedoms, that of movement.

How about a story? This story of New York’s MTA, of a city public transit system, came to me in today’s edition of The Morning, a New York Time’s email bulletin.  Public transportation is the lifeblood of any large city.  A shared system for moving about, that alone makes sense in a city with a population of millions.

Here is a segment excerpted from the New York Times report on the state of the New York Metropolitan Transit System.

For the past few years, fare beating has again become a regular part of public transit. I’ve watched people do it just a few feet away from powerless transit workers looking directly at them.

My colleague Ana Ley, who covers mass transit, wrote a story this week focused on buses that quantified the problem in New York City with a jarring statistic: On nearly half of all bus rides in the city, people now skip paying the fare. As a result, about one million riders ignore the bus system’s most basic rule every weekday.

To read the complete story in The Morning, CLICK HERE.

Nietzsche’s writing is replete with descriptions of the course we’d take, our life-in-these-times:

The dangerous and uncanny point
has been reached
when the greatest, most diverse, most comprehensive life
lives past the old morality.

The “individual” is left standing there,
forced to give himself laws,
forced to rely on his own arts
and wiles of self-preservation, self-enhancement, self-redemption.

There is nothing
but new whys and hows;
there are no longer any shared formulas;

misunderstanding is allied with disregard;
decay, ruin, and the highest desires are horribly entwined;
the genius of the race overflows
from every cornucopia of good and bad;
there is a disastrous simultaneity of spring and autumn,…

Danger has returned,
the mother of morals, great danger,
displaced onto the individual this time,
onto the neighbor or friend,
onto the street, onto your own child,
onto your own heart,…

…nothing lasts as long
as the day after tomorrow
except one species of person,
the hopelessly mediocre.

Only the mediocre
have prospects for continuing on,
for propagating –
they are the people of the future, the only survivors:

“Be like them! Be mediocre!”

is the only morality that still makes sense, that still finds ears.

Beyond Good and Evil, by Friedrich Nietzsche, trans. by Judith Norman, aphorism 262