Pythia Peay's Blog - Posts Tagged "pythia-peay"
What a D.C. Cab Driver From Ethiopia Taught Me About Being a Better American
Last weekend, while out in Washington,D.C., and with the metro running behind schedule because of maintenance being done on some of their trains, I found myself in the back seat of a cab being driven by a young man from Ethiopia. He’d been in this country for four years, he told me, as we wound our way down Massachusetts Ave., past the stately embassies, and when I asked him how he liked our capital city, he replied that he’d been “to London, Paris, and Rome” and that of those cities D.C. was by far the most beautiful. He knew all its streets by heart now, he told me, and as often as he drove around them on his rounds, he never tired of the buildings and monuments, and the great mingling of people from around the world crowding the streets.
It wasn’t just Washington that my cab driver loved, though, but America, too, and his patriotism flared brightly as he began talking about how much he loved this country, and how fortunate he felt to be living here. As we passed the Lincoln Memorial, we began chatting about the Founding Fathers, a topic he knew as much about, if not more, than did I, a natural born citizen. He’d steeped himself in biographies of Washington, Jefferson, Adams, and Madison and when I asked him which of the Founders was his favorite, he reflected for a moment, and then said he thought John Adams. Then he surprised me even further by remarking that he couldn’t understand why there was no memorial to our second president of the United States: something I’d never considered, which was surprising given that I was just in the midst of re-reading David McCullough’s fine biography of Adams. As he dropped me off, I thanked him for such an interesting ride home, and wished him well in his job as a cab driver struggling to keep up with the competition from uber, and to support his wife and two little daughters.
Later I thought how our encounter had given me renewed appreciation for those newest of arrivals to our United States, who despite hardship and struggle in our oftentimes ruthless capitalist market still see through fresh eyes and a kind of purity of heart the value of our ongoing historic experiment in democracy. And it made me remember a story I’d once told to the legendary post-Jungian scholar James Hillman. We were talking about America for my book "America on the Couch," and I told him about a waitress I’d once had, also newly arrived from Africa, who’d spontaneously told me that we Americans have “such heart” and that our hearts “were wonderful.” He’d heard that so often, Hillman replied thoughtfully. “And it’s true.” Indeed, as the renowned thinker on soul Thomas Moore said in our interview about America, one way to really fulfill our democratic ideals would be to reflect on the Statue of Liberty, and “the ideal it stands for of accepting other peoples in this country.”
Instead of focusing solely on immigration as a legal issue, wouldn't taking it on as part of every citizen's psychological soul task of being American, with all this task's complexity around accepting "the other," and learning about and remembering our own immigration stories, be a fine way of being patriotic in our world today?
It wasn’t just Washington that my cab driver loved, though, but America, too, and his patriotism flared brightly as he began talking about how much he loved this country, and how fortunate he felt to be living here. As we passed the Lincoln Memorial, we began chatting about the Founding Fathers, a topic he knew as much about, if not more, than did I, a natural born citizen. He’d steeped himself in biographies of Washington, Jefferson, Adams, and Madison and when I asked him which of the Founders was his favorite, he reflected for a moment, and then said he thought John Adams. Then he surprised me even further by remarking that he couldn’t understand why there was no memorial to our second president of the United States: something I’d never considered, which was surprising given that I was just in the midst of re-reading David McCullough’s fine biography of Adams. As he dropped me off, I thanked him for such an interesting ride home, and wished him well in his job as a cab driver struggling to keep up with the competition from uber, and to support his wife and two little daughters.
Later I thought how our encounter had given me renewed appreciation for those newest of arrivals to our United States, who despite hardship and struggle in our oftentimes ruthless capitalist market still see through fresh eyes and a kind of purity of heart the value of our ongoing historic experiment in democracy. And it made me remember a story I’d once told to the legendary post-Jungian scholar James Hillman. We were talking about America for my book "America on the Couch," and I told him about a waitress I’d once had, also newly arrived from Africa, who’d spontaneously told me that we Americans have “such heart” and that our hearts “were wonderful.” He’d heard that so often, Hillman replied thoughtfully. “And it’s true.” Indeed, as the renowned thinker on soul Thomas Moore said in our interview about America, one way to really fulfill our democratic ideals would be to reflect on the Statue of Liberty, and “the ideal it stands for of accepting other peoples in this country.”
Instead of focusing solely on immigration as a legal issue, wouldn't taking it on as part of every citizen's psychological soul task of being American, with all this task's complexity around accepting "the other," and learning about and remembering our own immigration stories, be a fine way of being patriotic in our world today?
