Last Tuesday, I was headed to Sea-Tac airport from downtown Seattle via taxi when the driver struck up a conversation. As much as I’m usually BlackBerrying it up on my rides to and from airports via whatever mode of transportation I’m a passenger in, I’m always game to have a good conversation with someone, and this cabbie had some great things to say. He was asking me where i was from, and after I told him New Jersey, he shared some stories about being on the East Coast, and we talked about airlines a bit, how pricing has changed over the last few years with airfare, and so on. In the middle of the chat, he refers to a song that’s playing on the radio, and asks me if I would go for a trivia question. Being the stathead that I like to be (random knowledge isn’t ever really useless, you know), I’m game. So, the question he asks is this: What nation was the first to recognize the independence of the United States.
“Good question,” I replied. I’m figuring, of course, that this is either a trick question (and it’s like England) or that it’s something else on the easy fare, such as France or Germany. I rattle through five or six countries, and he is definitely getting a kick out of it. After throwing out a clue regarding Casablanca, I finally got it – Morocco. Turns out, Morocco was the first to hop on board. France, I believe he said, was third or fourth to do so.
Now, I know he wasn’t trying to teach me a lesson as a slacker American who should know these things, but it occurred to me that I’d never learned that, anywhere. We all know about the duke whose slaying caused a World War (or was that an archduke?), but who was the first country to recognize our own nation’s independence. Of course, the driver was from Morocco, has family there, and travels there a few times a year. But after having this discussion, and hearing the man’s legitimate happiness for being an American citizen now, and talking about all the great things he has an opportunity for here that he didn’t have back in his home nation brought everything down to brass tacks. We all just don’t get it. Sure, we all can’t stand one political candidate or another. We all hate paying too much in taxes, or getting stuck in traffic, or whatever, but at the end of the day, I guess we’ve all got it pretty good. Kind of sucks that we get to a point where we’re jaded about reality, but it is what it is. That being said, now I can see why whenever a friend or colleague goes on a sabbatical or some sort of missionary-type trip and comes back with a whole new way of looking at things – one that sticks around for a while, too – that this is pretty much exactly the same thing.
How do we fix this? I don’t know. It’s not as much about saying “we don’t teach our kids enough xyz” as it is about the fact that short attention span theatre isn’t just a funny show on cable – it’s a reality. Maybe I’m just getting older and starting to ponder things in a different way, or maybe it’s just that I spend entirely too much time on airplanes. Either way, there’s lots of crap that pisses me off on a daily basis, some of which I can control or have input in, some of which I don’t feel like I have input in. In reality, we’ve all got some sort of input somewhere, sometime. It’s just how we actually apply ourselves rather than going on our own happy, merry ways over and over again.
Thanks for listening!
/rant