Perspective

I took a cab to my friend's apartment the other day, and I had no idea what address to give to the cab driver (I never do.  It's one of the side effects of the Age of Smartphones: forgetting addresses, forgetting phone numbers and brain cancer).  He was clearly agitated with me until we finally figured out where I needed to go, and then he apologized.

"It's one of those days," he said.  It was an oddly defeated note to escape this large, stocky, bald-headed man in his 40s, a man who looked like he could probably bend a steel girder by merely glaring at it.

I asked him what he meant. "Money," he said.  "I was expecting to get more of it today."

How long had he been a taxi driver, I asked.  10 years.  But this was just side money, for his three daughters.  His real job was at a warehouse.  A pencil pusher, he said.  And he worked another job, but he was a bit vague about what that entailed, and I wasn't really going to push that point.

His daughters were in high school, he said.  I said he must be excited and nervous that they're approaching the age when they'll be starting to explore colleges.

He didn't respond for a moment.

"If they want to go to college," he sighed, "I don't know if I can afford to pay for that."

I said it defies me that there are some who make more in a week than most people make in an entire year, and he said, "Yeah, some of my friends are rich, too.  One of my friends, he makes like thirteen hundred a week.  I don't think I've ever made a thousand dollars in a week in my life."

Here was a man who was emasculated by the hand he'd been dealt in life. He was clearly hard working and reflective ‒ even if I can't speak to his intelligence ‒ and yet he could barely make ends meet. His daughters, too, would suffer from the effects of their father's position. There wouldn't likely be much pressure for them to attend college ‒ the one thing that, again and again, is highly correlated with economic mobility ‒ and if they did, they'd have to assume enormous debt to pay for it.

One of my favorite scenes in The West Wing (also known as The Greatest Show in the History of Television) occurred in its second season when the characters were sitting on a stoop in Georgetown (well, Burbank posing as Georgetown) drinking beer and discussing the trial of a terrorist who had attempted to assassinate the President.  Keep in mind, this was during the Clinton Administration, when we still tried these people people in civilian courts.  "What do you say about a country," one of the characters asked, "that protects even those who try to destroy it?"

But after speaking to this cabbie, I have a different question.  What do you say about a country where a father must work three jobs, and still can't pay for his daughters to go to college?

At the very least, it puts my problems in perspective.