When are politicians going to start dealing with the REAL issues?

Forget education, the homeless, minority issues, and the rest of that nonsense... When are politicians going to start making the subway a more pleasant experience? They can start doing this by banning two things: teenagers and backpacks.

I have, in the past, suggested sending all teenagers to Madagascar until they're 18. Let's face it, adolescence is a miserable time in everyone's life (whether you know it then or realize it later), and quite frankly, I see no reason why they should be hanging around making the rest of us miserable as well. For those of you who've found yourself asking "Why DOES Madagascar exist," I'm convinced this is what it was invented for.

Be that as it may, most other people have yet to decipher that little riddle of life and continue to allow these miscreants to infest the streets and subways. You see, here in New York, we get spoiled during the summer and forget to enjoy an almost teenage-free commute. Then, Labor Day rolls around, and they head back to school, monopolizing seats and lazily refusing to move a millimeter more than necessary on their way there.

Here's my proposed solution: force them to take the buses. The bus is a miserable experience anyway so nobody would notice the difference, AND (here's where the true genius of the idea comes in) the bus takes longer. The more time they spend on the bus, the less time they can spend loitering in front of Pino's and Maggie Moo's.

Now, you would think that banning teenagers would effectively ban backpacks by proxy, because what adult in their right mind wears a backpack? To work? With a suit? The answer to this is: far too many. First, the space taken up by that extra crap on your back is space someone could be standing in. And second, people constantly bash their backpack into other people (namely, me) because since it's not ACTUALLY a part of your body, that means it can't violate other people's personal space. To grown men (and a lesser extent, women) who use a backpack daily: backpacks are for hiking and carrying schoolbooks. Get your ass up to Bloomingdales and buy a Jack Spade bag, already.