For a moment yesterday I found myself a captive audience, having unwittingly provoked the cab driver. He asked where I was from, and I’d followed up by asking how he liked living in this city. His response was sharp: he’d loved it when he moved here twenty years ago, but now it was “ruined” by the homeless, people on welfare, and governments that enable them. He grew heated as he declared these people “the problem”, insisting that services should be dismantled to force people to “pick themselves up by their bootstraps” and “stop costing the rest of us money.”
When I first got into the car, I had thought to myself how kind his eyes looked. Now, his brow furrowed and eyes hardened, I looked at my app…twenty more minutes. As his monologue unfolded, I found myself wondering what had triggered it. Did he assume I was on welfare and thought shaming me might be effective? Did he believe I shared his views and wanted to preach to the choir? Was he simply overflowing with frustration, spilling his grievances onto the nearest listener? Did my demeanor and few words somehow indicate that I was worthy of engaging in debate?
I sat with my discomfort, willing it to shift consciously into curiosity. Then I said, “The system doesn’t seem to be working,” cautiously starting with common ground. Then a question: “If unwillingness to work isn’t itself evidence of a lack of capacity under the system, what is it?” He stumbled incredulously through his thoughts, finally landing on an answer veering toward a notion of inferiority, though he stopped short of saying it outright. I offered my own belief that everyone is doing their best. That unwillingness to work with & for a system is a symptom of a broken system, not a broken person.
“If I can do it, why can’t they!?” he declared hotly. He went on to describe himself as a proud immigrant, and invoked what he called the “Asian mindset” of hard work and resilience, describing his own struggles to make ends meet despite long hours and relentless effort.
“The system doesn’t seem to be working for you either,” I offered. He paused momentarily. It’s easier, I thought, to blame those with you on the ladder than to consider the forces that either inspire one to give up or to keep climbing endlessly, never reaching the top. I tried to will this thought into his mind, though I didn’t dare say it aloud.
He started to share stories of persons he ferried who were receiving welfare and proud of it. Of politicians who’d opened up to him from the back seat of his cab, decrying the system’s failure and cost, blaming it on those who would “abuse it.” He spoke of personal observations and feelings.
I walked a knife’s edge, trying to meet his frustrations with both empathy and facts without invalidating his lived experience. “I am not an expert,” I mentioned, “but I see patterns in the human and economic results of programs like Housing First, recent trials of Universal Basic Income, even Portugal’s war against drugs, that lead me to believe that we need to be doing more, better, differently – not less. Half assing or removing welfare just doesn’t cut it for society’s economic goals or its commitment to its people.”
As we pulled up to the airport, he asked, “At what point are people—not the system—at fault?”
I replied, “When the system works for most people.”
I thanked him sincerely for the ride and the conversation. He grunted and waved, seeming neither convinced nor triumphant. As I entered the terminal, I thought about how careful I had been with my words, what I’d left unsaid or only half said. What I managed to articulate did seem to make him pause. That pause felt like it could have been the smallest crack in a deeply held belief. I couldn’t control whether he would change his mind about welfare, but I was proud of how I rose to the occasion. Proud of my brain for recalling relevant information in the moment. Proud that I met his anger with curiosity, his assumptions with kindness.
And maybe, just maybe, he saw in me what I chose to see in him at the start: kind eyes, and a chance for connection.