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The Bay Area’s response to Google could be perceived as hostile by some, averse by others and yet antipathetic by others.

 

Google would like to provide mass transportation to its employees yet even in San Francisco, where pedestrians are an endangered species and road kill, protesters would rather have an addition 70 vehicles on the road than one private bus.

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My friend Brian recently explained that Google buses were utilizing MUNI bus stops for free and this accounted for public antipathy.

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Apparently, Google doesn’t mind the dangers intrinsic to sharing stops with MUNI buses.

 

Google now pays $1 for each pause at a MUNI stop in order appease its critics and to offset the wear and tear on the pavement; Brian has become more Google friendly as a result.

 

Ignoring the hue and cry of citizens opposed to private mass transportation, Google tossed more kindling on the fire by adding private ferry service from San Francisco to Redwood City, again having the audacity to siphon 150 employees off the log-jammed highways and into a private conveyance.

 

Google even had the chutzpah to christen their elitist ferry Triumphant as if their ferry was a warship out to for maritime supremacy over the public ferry serving the hoi polloi.

 

To everyone’s relieve, Google ferry riders “are not permitted to park in the Harbor Bay ferry lots or on adjacent neighborhood streets.”

 

One might wonder, how the police will know which cars parking in “adjacent neighborhood streets” belong to nefarious Google employees and which cars belong to innocent people and decent, honest citizens?

 

Will all Google employees have to affix identifying stickers to their luxurious cars?

 

According to trusted sources, Google buses and ferries “have come to symbolize tech-driven gentrification.”

 

Of all the gentrification in all the towns in all the world, tech-driven gentrification has to be the worst pox for despoiling neighborhoods; my car has a bumper sticker which reads: “Stop Gentrification Now: Drop the Hammer, Saw, Paint Brush and Termite Kit!”

 

When private Google transportation metastasized to the West Oakland BART, protesters accused Google riders of exploiting non-Googlelites.

 

Googlelites are accused of forcing non-Googlelites to “serve them coffee, watch their kids, have sex with them for money, make them food.”

 

Sounds like an entire service industry is being held at gun point.

 

If you saw a Googlelite in a Starbucks, would you report it?

 

The protesters pointed to other Googlelite atrocities like they “live fat as hogs” apparently grazing incessantly on the “free 24/7 buffet” tables.

 

Oh gluttony where is thy sting?

 

It seems that equity is at the bottom of this culture war, not the $1 bus stop fee as Brian optimistically suggested.

 

Equity is a drum beat rarely missing in political speeches these days.

 

The equity issue rallies us to ignore the traditional prohibitions against coveting: “Thy shall not covet thy neighbor’s male servant, his female servant, his ox, his donkey or anything that is your neighbor’s.”

 

The Tenth Commandment does not specifically prohibit us from coveting thy neighbor’s Google Bus, his Ferry Service, his paycheck, nor his 24/7 buffet table.

 

Frankly speaking, it is best to forget your neighbor’s ox and donkey; do you really want to ride either of them to work?

 

Do we even know what top speed is for even the fastest donkey?

 

Equity, more specifically a lack of equity, really gets our hackles up in a visceral blend of self-rightness and victimhood.

 

Historically, there is a while class of world leaders who dedicated their political careers to forced equity: Lenin, Hugo Chavez, the Castro Brothers, Ceausescu, Mao, Stalin, Peron.

 

Although all these egalitarians met with varying degrees of success, there is no compelling reason to abandon political means or military force to achieve equity just yet.

 

Remaining fixated on the trampling of our Constitutional guarantee of Equity, entitles us to indulge in also violating the Sixth Deadly Sin: Envy.

 

The lack of equity seems to have obviated the Sixth Deadly Sin, we are morally justified in envying all the privileges and consumer goods that those high-tech dweebs and nerds can consume while we are condemned to look from afar and salivate over their evil greed.

 

Personally, being a bon vivant, I envy the opportunity to “live fat as hogs.”

 

Does a bottomless wind goblet come with that 24/7 buffet table?

 

While I do have principles, I like to show flexibility and political compromise: Give me grazing rights to that 24/7 buffet table and enough wine to wash it all down with and I promise I’ll never picket another Google Bus or Ferry again.

 

 

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