So Marta is changing the Yellow line to the Gold line to help ease relations with the Asian community as reported today by the AJC. I can’t begin to explain how pissed off I get when I hear about stuff like this. Get over it, I am sure it was not intentional and as my mom would say, your making a mountain of a mole hill. If the Asian community can be upset over this, here are some other people that can be mad at Marta:
1) Milton County residents – If you know your history of the Atlanta area, you know that Milton County merged with Fulton County in 1932 to save it from bankruptcy during the Great Depression. As an individual who lives in former Milton County, I am personally insulted that MARTA still considers my community to be a poor, fiscally irresponsible part of the community and named our rail service the red line.
2) Tree Huggers – To save money I have no doubt that Marta spent a significant sum of money to print rail maps in bulk. These not only include the maps inside the trains, but pamphlets which can be found on any bus or train operated by Marta. How many trees are we wasting here?
3) Tax Payers – For the same reasons as above; not to mention the numerous man hours spent to re-render, re-draw, and put up these new posters, pamphlets and web based maps. Last I checked, the Center for Pan Asian Community Services was not willing to flip the bill for this. But again, what’s $10,000.00 for a government authority that stands to lose $1,200,000,000.00 over the next 10 years.
4) The Asian community at Helen Kim, director of advocacy and education at the Center for Pan Asian Community Services; the tip of the spear in this push. Though Kim may feel violated by the naming of the yellow line, an unforeseen result is the national publicity which helps educate people, whom may already not know, that yellow is a derogatory term towards Asians; not to mention that they all look like a bunch of whiney bitches. I have the feeling that most people in the Asian community never read into this matter till someone brought it to their attention; then again, I’m not Asian, and I don’t let matters like this bother me.
5) Black people – the AJC.com article explained how MARTA CEO Beverly Scott actually went as far as to find this “matter” necessary to bring up the Atlanta Civil Rights Movement. Yeah, right; I did not see 750 Asians thrown in jail over this.
Ever since I was a little kid I always enjoyed raiding the supplies closet at my dad’s engineering firm and stealing the super expensive (as in like <$8) .05 mechanical pencils. I remember my mom would always get upset with me because I would press down to hard and break the lead.