Baby causes chaos for public transport

Suffice to say that Eris is not hateful of malicious. – Principia Discordia

A bizarre bit of news caught my attention today. Apparently a woman and her child in Australia were kicked off of a bus because the baby was laughing too loudly. The situation is pretty fascinating to anyone who has ever ridden public transit: of all the things that have ever happened to justify kicking someone off a bus, this driver had to pick on a happy baby.

Sometimes, I guess people just have to find some way to impose order and this baby was an easy target. It is, after all, difficult to find more evidence that people are predisposed towards chaos than by observing small children and babies.  They will laugh, cry, wet themselves, and demand to be fed, without regard for cultural standards, where they happen to be, or what anyone will think of them. For someone who has dedicated themselves to order, a baby is an easy target. 

The driver didn’t even target a crying baby, which everyone knows is beyond anyone’s power to quiet reliably without causing serious injury. Instead, the target was a happy baby, and it is easy to make a baby unhappy, so this mother was targeted for not using her power to make her child unhappy. It certainly makes me wonder what kind or narcissist this bus driver must be to think that her whim should be enough for a mother to interfere with a child’s happiness. 

By trying to keep some extreme version of order on her bus, the driver has probably thrown her own life into chaos: the kind of uproar that has resulted after this incident usually sees results. The predictable result will be that the driver will lose her job. This is usually the easiest way for an organization to deal with high-profile complaints.

Changing tone for a moment, I would like to explore some scenarios in which the bus driver may have been in the right:

1. The bus was being high-jacked and the driver wanted to protect the child without drawing dangerous attention to the high-jacking.
2. The bus had failed to pass an emissions check and the passenger’s area of the bus was found to be filled with a level of toxic fumes dangerous to children.
3. It was not a baby at all, but a bomb concealed in baby clothes.
4. The baby had a sonic-based super power, and the laughing was causing glass to break and ears to bleed.