I remember in the weeks after 9/11 having a few really great conversations with Muslim cabbies in NY about this kind of thing. Usually Id start it by just asking how things had been for him in the wake of that day, and the responses were really interesting. A couple pointed out that they were in America precisely because they rejected the kind of mindset that produced 9/11. One told me he wanted his daughter to have opportunities. One was driving a natural gas taxi with a tank in the back that used up the trunk so our luggage wouldnt fit; I told him if youre driving a natural gas taxi, were gonna ride with our luggage in the back seat. He told us that he saw the whole oil dependency as a huge source of the worlds problems, and thats why he was doing his part trying to do something different even though it was costing him fares. Most said they were getting looks from what they presumed were tourists (yes, as any New Yorker will tell you, we can see you!) who would then wave them on. These guys bust their asses; a typical cab shift as I understand it is 16 hours; the first 8 or so pay for the cab, the next 8, or however many you can do, is where you make your money. Yet another example of people coming to America and putting their shoulder to the wheel to make a better life for their kids, most just horrified at what was being done in the name of Islam. Theres been so much in the news lately, by the Nattering Nabobs, prattling on in ways that are just so stupid, pretending to speak for whites or blacks or illegals or whatever it is. I reject all of it. I am a white person who doesnt identify as white any more than I identify as brunette. Most of my heroes when I was growing up were black men and women, just by happenstance. In the first grade, the nuns had me reading the Readers Digest, and one of the condensed books in there was Up From Slavery, which is a damned big subject for a 6-year-old. I remember being just so dumbstruck by it for about a month afterwards, and Booker T. has been a hero of mine ever since. And so I read more such books; these people who triumphed over such an awful crucible were inspiring me even when I was very small. And then, when I was a little older, the music that African-American culture has given us became a sort of natural lifeline for me, a lonely kid in a small town in Oregon. Messages from my home planet, I call those records, and I spent many hours a day with my headphones on just bathing in that music, knowing I was not alone. And so I get just so tired of the McNews spewing forth about big, monolithic groups of people; Ive travelled the world and know they are full of shit, and its a pity that they get to speak for us. I am an individual soul, not a white nor, to be honest, an American, and we are a planet of individual souls, and in every culture Ive found about an equal amount of truly beautiful people and an equal amount of jackasses. But the one thing the jackasses almost always have in common is that tendency to see people as their race, or origin, or faith, or some other marker that lets them understand someone without understanding them at all. Dare I say it, theres a whole lot of us who could stand to spend a few weeks riding with, and talking, straight across, to New Yorks cabbies.
Posted on: Mon, 15 Dec 2014 19:41:03 +0000
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