what happens when you talk to people

[Kragen Sitaker]

>From isen.com's SMART letter #80, "Trans-Pacific Tour, part one"; a
couple of years ago, this could have been me, and maybe it'll be me
again in the future, but I've been too tired lately.

    The cab driver who took me to the airport provided another
    memorable encounter.  When I got into the cab, he asked me how I
    wanted to go to the airport.  I looked at my watch and suggested
    the scenic route.  He was in his sixties, I guess.  He was born in
    Iraq, neither Muslim, nor Kurd, but a Christian.  He had lived in
    the Ukraine, in some other former Soviet republic, in Egypt, in
    Singapore, and he had recently moved to Melbourne and achieved
    Australian residency.  He had a Ph.D. in food microbiology, and he
    was delighted to meet another Bio Ph.D.

    I asked him about the threatened U.S. invasion of the country of
    his birth.  His answer did not have a clich<E9> or habitual
    thought in it.  He talked about how the powerful use power and
    about how people let themselves be oppressed.  Mostly he talked of
    his own experiences.  He would interrupt himself to show me the
    sights -- here a hospital, there a park -- and to ask me about the
    United States.

    He had no idea about U.S. racism; his eyes widened when I told him
    that dark skinned people in the U.S. had higher infant mortality,
    longer prison sentences, lower incomes and shorter lives.  I
    assured him that most people in the U.S. thought that this was not
    a good situation, and that it was still a great country, and that
    even with racism there was tremendous opportunity for immigrants.
    He smiled.  But he thought he would stay in Australia.

    At the airport, I stepped out of the cab onto the surface of the
    Earth with more awareness than when I had stepped into the cab.  A
    consulting firm I used to work with at AT&T -- GBN -- calls its
    affiliated clever consultants and powerful pundits "remarkable
    people" after Gurdjieff's book, _Meetings with Remarkable Men_ .
    Gurdjieff's remarkable men were avatars in the original sense,
    embodiments of divine consciousness sent to Earth for a purpose.
    The cab driver would not have fit the GBN profile, but I think he
    might have fit Gurdjieff's...

    COPYRIGHT NOTICE: Redistribution of this document, or any
    part of it, is permitted for non-commercial purposes,
    provided that the two lines below are reproduced with it:
    Copyright 2002 by David S. Isenberg
    isen@isen.com -- http://isen.com/ -- 1-888-ise n-com

-- 
<kragen@pobox.com>       Kragen Sitaker     <http://www.pobox.com/~kragen/>
Edsger Wybe Dijkstra died in August of 2002.  The world has lost a great
man.  See http://advogato.org/person/raph/diary.html?start=252 and
http://www.kode-fu.com/geek/2002_08_04_archive.shtml for details.