A Story of Three Cab Drivers

It’s an old chestnut that journalists talk to cab drivers in order to find out what’s really going on in a place they don’t know well. I’ve always talked to them because I enjoy it — I still do today, even though I’m not really a journalist anymore. And I’d like to tell you about three that stick in my memory.

More than a decade ago, I was living in Damascus, Syria and writing about economics and business in the Middle East. Despite the government’s firehose of anti-American propaganda, I never found any animus among Syrians. So when yet another cab driver asked where I was from, I didn’t hesitate to tell him that I was American. “I love America,” he said. “Great people, terrible government — just like us!”

Indeed, most Syrians I met in the streets of Damascus—just like most Iraqis, Iranians, Lebanese, you name it—seemed to have friends or family living in the United States. These adoptive Americans weren’t plotting attacks on their unsuspecting compatriots; rather, they were working hard and sending back crucial funds to their loved ones in much poorer economies.

So I sighed to myself recently when another cab driver, this time in Québec, told me how some Canadians were worried about the thousands of Syrians being resettled there by Justin Trudeau’s government. “If we let in a thousand,” he said, “maybe two of them are bad people, and then maybe it’s better not to let any of them in.”

Fortunately, there was an easy response to this notion. “In the United States,” I replied, “we may already have two bad people—but we don’t have 998 friends.”

If you think about it, there may well be two bad people in every group of a thousand, no matter where they’re from. But if you have 998 friends from the same community, you have a much better chance of finding and dealing with the two bad people. Moreover, if you reject the entire thousand, even though almost all of them deserve your compassion, there may soon be more than two people who want to bring you down.

A few days ago I was riding with a third cab driver in the city where I was born, New Haven, CT. Like the others, he was a talkative middle-aged man who seemed to enjoy his job. He was from Baghdad, having left after the 2003 invasion unleashed a chaos that cost hundreds of thousands of lives. He went first to Egypt, and then to the United States — a country he had clearly come to love, despite what its government did to his.

“I can’t reach Donald Trump,” he said. “I need to tell him that we want the same things as everyone else. To work and a good life for our families. We are the same as everyone else.”

This man, whose name was Mohamed, was just as American as I am. He already makes the country a better place by his presence. And he was right—if he could reach Donald Trump and his supporters, the country might be better still. Greater, even.