Chris Minerd

Rail Tales: Stories Made on the Red Line – June 23, 2011 – 5:43pm

The MBTA police is out in full force today. Can’t seem to find a reason why.

Now it’s not just the cops standing outside the station, searching your bags for explosives and other devices that go kaboom. They’re IN the station this time – right here in Downtown Crossing. Maybe they came down for a pretzel (though, like Menino until a few weeks ago, I never really fully trust vendor food – on the street, underground, or anywhere else).

One of the cops looks eerily like Ivan Drago, who – as we all know – was the main antagonist in Rocky IV. I hear the entire franchise was good – well, maybe Rocky V was a stretch. But whenever I come across a Rocky movie on TV, it’s almost always Rocky IV. “I must crush you.” Beautiful.

If I was 20 years older and lived through the Cold War as an adult, I always thought that communism’s downfall would be sparked by a bad Philadelphia accent.

Speaking of downfalls, maybe the day-glo yellow vests worn by MBTA’s finest will be the downfall of terrorism. It is a pretty blinding color. And if the terrorists are fashionistas, too, then forget about it. But I would wager that maybe we’re getting it pretty light here in the US of A. I saw an old college friend’s Facebook post the other day, and she said the transit police in Paris were armed to the nines. Not just a pistol on the hip, but machine guns across the chest. Real stuff over there. And given the attack a few years back, you might be able to see why.

It’s tough to police, I’ll admit. When our city moves hundreds of thousands of people each day, that’s a lot to secure. The numbers of shoes you would need to check? Double!

But I would never pass through one of those security checkpoints. They have those dogs out there. And if Homeland Security knows my biggest weakness, it’s a dog in uniform.

So I’ll just have to settle with “See something, say something.”

Which reminds me – I should say something about that 8-foot-tall backpack at Harvard. Looks suspicious to me.

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