The holiday season is now fully upon us. With it, comes the spirit of giving. In a world seemingly gone mad, descended into a cesspool of despair, sadness and disorder, it is difficult, if not near impossible at times, to decide upon where to deliver your dedicated bounty of benevolent compassion.

This year, might I suggest, you bestow your gift of kindness close to home, here in Toronto, to a newly diagnosed local malady. SDS. Or, Subway Derangement Syndrome.

A relatively new ailment of the heart and mind, little is known about SDS, its causes, its pathogenic qualities. Initially, medical professionals thought it to be hypochondriacal in nature, affecting mainly the political class of this city. A mental affliction seeing personal and professional advancement entwined with the building of subways where none were necessary. This belief evolved into something of a persecution complex. Subways weren’t essential. Subways were ‘deserved’. Denying subways to those suffering from SDS was seen as tantamount to denying them civic citizenship.

Manifestations of SDS varied. For some it led to incessant chanting, like football hooligans, of a single word, the single word. Subways, Subways, Subways! (Chant along with us, won’t you?) The people want Subways! Others simply made up words or phrases like Surface Subways. Some even went so far as to see their political future in a sunflower.

Psychological projection is also a symptom of SDS. You see your glaring weaknesses in others, and accuse them of actions which you yourself have partaken in. Your self-serving motivations, say, become their self-serving motivations. Your ambitions are laudable. Theirs, dishonest and deceitful, driven only for personal gain.

Darkly and menacingly, SDS has lately been seen seeping into the professional ranks of the city. Those whose work would largely benefit from politically-motivated subways not being built are now exhibiting the same irrational behavioural outbursts as their similarly troubled political counterparts. Numbers are fuzzy to them. New, untested ways of managing reality are sought. Once outspoken, SDS induced professionals withdraw behind an impenetrable bureaucratic wall, never to be seen or heard from in any meaningful way again.

Unchecked, Subway Derangement Syndrome can grow in proportion to a point where an individual embraced in its destructive grip can become unrecognizable to their former self. Only SDS can explain such confusion, such mental to-and-froing in one individual over the course of barely a year!

At such an advanced stage of SDS, these particular victims also begin to display troubling signs of delusions of grandeur, wrapping themselves in flags of local pride and disenfranchisement. Modern day William Wallaces, if you will, defenders of their people, the disaffected, the subway-less. “They can take our lives but they will never take our subways! …. Which we don’t have in the first place … except for two or three stops … But we want more! We deserve more.”

Local Man Searches For Lost Dignity And Ethics

So far gone are such individuals that they no longer even bother to try making rational arguments in favour of their beloved subways. Ridership numbers are totally irrelevant to them. Chosen routes are neither here nor there. Just so long as there is a subway somewhere near them. A subway they can call their own. A subway to make them feel whole again.

Now, where would your generous donation to SDS go? Certainly not to the billions of dollars being asked to deliver that subway. That would be like giving candy to cavity-ravaged children in order to keep them quiet. As soon as it’s gone, they’ll demand more and more and more.

No. Your money and time would go to those prepared to make an intervention in an attempt to stop the downward spiral of budgets and reputations. Organizations holding firm to the fact that there are better options on the table, that an SDS subway would represent a step backward not forward. Individuals standing at the ready to unseat politicians undermined by a disease of their own making, who are no longer making a positive contribution to the public good.

While Subway Derangement Syndrome is an individual ailment, it has proven to be highly contagious, resistant to reason and what was once called common sense before the term became corrupted by misuse. We can no longer idly wish it away, hope it burns out in its own virulent malignancy. Only you, we together, can defeat this threat to our future well-being. By giving generously this holiday season to others, you will be giving yourself a gift. The gift of transit sanity.

— pledgingly submitted by Cityslikr