Doing Sociology with Ghosts

Home now - thinking back over all those train stations and subway stations full of people (and about the SHOCK of a two day  train strike), I want to ask a question dangerously close to nonsense: what do all the Minnesota counterparts of those people have in mind - that is, all the people who would be in train stations and subway stations and regional train centers, if we had (more than 2 or 3) such things? How many hundreds of thousands of intentions get redirected or strangled in their bassinets, for lack of civilized, affordable public transportation? Some projects can be transferred to cars, or to electronic media, surely. But most of them just don't go anywhere. And so, one has the mystery of ghostly frustration, of all those aborted travel plans, all those millions of missed connections, failed homecomings, cancelled reunions. I can't believe that the explanation of people's lives is just: they work with what is possible for them. To some extent, they also suffer from what isn't possible. They keep lowering their expectations. And somehow, out of all that, the character, the typical attitude, of a people emerges. And that is partly what one encounters as the mood of a city, the rhythm of a city. 

The problem is that good political thinking has to take account of all those ghosts. We can't just work to improve what we have. The ghosts of what  we could be are really just everywhere. And I don't see any way to know that except to move around, to smell different air.