Crazy Train, er, Bus

Today, like every day, the bus to campus was dangerously overcrowded. College students were crawling over one another to try and find a spot where they could hang on for dear life as the bus driver careened around the corners trying to get to school before one o'clock. I don't know why we can't use one of the larger, older buses, or maybe have the bus go to campus more than once every thirty minutes, but I guess that you get what you pay for. I was standing near the back of the bus, on a little elevated platform where the aisle narrows to accommodate more seats, and was holding on with both hands so that I wouldn't fall forward on to the poor girl in front of/ below me. Behind me, another poor little Chinese girl was trying desperately not to push me over the stairs and start some kind of horrible/hilarious human domino effect. Unfortunately, I was wearing my backpack, which was filled not only my laptop but also The Phenomenology of Spirit and Philosophical Investigations, and every time the bus swerved, my bag would shift and whack the girl right in the face.
To make matters even more awkward and uncomfortable, every thirty seconds or so, a distant, authoritative, automated voice would come over the PA and say, "Please remove your backpacks, in order to give other passengers on the bus more room." Over and over again, this calm, soothing man's voice was gently urging me to remove my bulky bag and leave the girl behind me alone. "Please remove your backpacks, in order to give other passengers on the bus more room." Whack. "Please remove your backpacks, in order to give other passengers on the bus more room." Smack. I could feel everyone else on the bus watching me, judging me with their Gazes of the Others. Why, oh why, was I insisting on tyrannizing this girl with my big, bulky, philosophy-filled backpack?
I was stuck between a rock and a hard place, or, more accurately, between an undergraduate and a small ledge. "Please remove your backpacks, in order to give other passengers on the bus more room." But if I removed my backpack, I would need to hold on to it, and then I would only have one hand to hold on to the pole! Didn't the man inside the PA box understand this? If I let go, the consequences would be dire - a giant, mixed-race, upper middle class dogpile, right in the middle of the bus. I could try to explain to the girl behind me this, that I was sorry, that I understood her predicament, but that I just didn't think that it was a good idea for me to remove my backpack at this time, and so on, and so on. But this would have entailed me turning around in a one hundred eighty degree manner, and the odds were that I would only succeed in bumping the Law School student on the other side of me.
So I did the only reasonable thing I could do - nothing. I gripped the bar tighter, and tried my darndest not to start a human domino effect, and if someone innocent has to suffer because of it, well, I guess that that's a sacrifice that we all must be willing to make. Or I could just start getting up earlier and taking the eight fifteen bus, which is like, a third as crowded.