Yesterday I went about my normal commute to work. I took one train from Princeton to Princeton Junction, then waited at the latter station for the next train to Newark. The crowd at this time in the morning swells and heaves, pushing through one another to stand on the thick yellow line (despite yellow cautionary letters pleading to stay back) and gape left to see if the train is coming. The train comes at the same time every day, and each day I see people doing this I want to smack them and say, "You'll see it when it comes!" But I don't. I stand back from the tracks and wait for the train, which almost always comes on time. Then people push by one another, middle-aged men pushing through old women, young girls, old men, everyong pushing, shoving, like cattle onto the train.

On this day, however, as I stood next to three Middle-Eastern men, a tight-lipped white woman with messy curls, and one or two Asian men, the train whisked by on the track it normally stops on, and came to a hault a hundred feet or so away from the platform.

"They forgot to stop," the woman said, her voice aghast, as though nothing worse could possibly have come in the way of her day.

"Maybe it's a new guy," I offered, trying to lighten the mood around me as people began to shift their feet and panic. The Middle-Eastern men grinned at me and one said, "He should be fired."

The woman stated angrily that she would go get a coffee while I waited with everyone else for the arrival of the next train. I would be late to work, but what do I care? Within ten minutes, an announcement told us that an AmTrak train would take those of us with tickets to Newark and New York onto their train since we had so suddenly been forgotten and left behind.

The train came, and the cattle, whose numbers had grown since the train skipped by, darted for the doors, their eyes wild, mad with hurry. I stood back, appalled, used to the site but nauseated nonetheless. When I finally made my way onto the train, I watched as two middle-aged men tore through one of the ticket collector's things (which had been placed on a seat) and threw them in the overhead bin, complaining all the while that it was "too bad, tough for him, OH WELL". I saw the seats were all filled, and the cattle before me had panic in their eyes. Stand, all the way to New York? I was disgusted, and decided to wait for the next train.

I quickly hopped off the train and saw, coming behind me, was an Asian man. He had crutches, and his legs were bent in such a way that I could only assume he was crippled rather than injured. I had seen him standing in the aisle on the train, blank-faced, waiting. No one stood for him. No one offered him a seat. It's likely that no one glanced at him, even. He popped off the train behind me and the doors closed, and I thought, what inhumanity. I said to him, "You need to wait for a seat," and someone standing on the platform, with the same idea as me, gave me a look of shock, as though she too had the same thoughts as I and was appalled at this sickening train commuter culture.

Each day I take the train, something new reminds me of the lack of humanity embedded within us. Or perhaps humanity is, truly, Xenophobia, and they are the most human of all those I've ever encountered.