The taxi cab industry is rife with lunatics who won’t stop disturbing the peace, and until somebody calls them out old ladies are going to die bloody deaths in urban crosswalks while lowly apartment-dwellers are driven to the brink of insanity.
The taxi problem in our major cities perfectly encapsulates the hallmarks of immigration reform: convenience for some, and angry dangerous apocalyptic chaos in the streets for most everyone else.
Let me explain.
In Washington, D.C., there are approximately three taxi cabs on the street for every pedestrian. Right off the bat, this exacerbates the city’s daunting traffic problem. Streets in D.C. are narrow and they’ve gotten narrower because now a bunch of lame white liberals pedal around in bike lanes toting fanny packs filled with Whole Foods-brand acne cream. (RELATED: Liberal Hipsters Make Race Relations Worse)
Considering that these taxi drivers are rolling burdens, you’d think that they would have some kind of humility. Like, ‘Hey sorry about taking up so much space. We’ll just try to be good citizens and drive safely and not cut anybody off or cause any problems.’ But no, that would be too much to ask.
They drive like Paris paparazzi who just spotted Princess Diana and Dodi Fayed. They drive like viewers fleeing a studio taping of ‘All In With Chris Hayes.’ They drive like Kennedys.
They do not respect pedestrian right of way. If you’re a pedestrian in a city, waiting 20 minutes at a time to cross the street, nothing makes you happier than seeing that little white man telling you it’s okay to cross. God, don’t you love that little white man. But then, just as you step onto the street, a cab comes whipping around the corner, paralyzing you with existential dread. The cab pulls up inches from your mortal body. Gasping for breath, you plead with the cab driver with anxious eyes or middle fingers. Why are you driving this way? But the cab driver cannot hear you. Because he is busy honking at you.
They won’t…STOP…HONKING…THEIR…GOD…FORSAKEN…HORNS.
Ninety percent of the noise pollution in Washington, D.C. is just inter-cab rivalries. Red-painted cars pulling up to crosswalks and honking at their rivals in the green-painted cars. The American roadways are all some kind of game to them. They’re playing Bumper Boats on Ellis Island.
Why can’t they respect that they are guests in this country providing a service? Why? Why?
Most cab drivers are either from the Middle East – where al-Qaida, Hamas, Hezbollah, and other groups live – or, as Joe Biden pointed out, from Somalia or neighboring countries, where Al Shabaab and Boko Haram and similar Islamist militant groups set up shop. Is it appropriate to have so many largely unverified people from terrorist nations in our country, and our capital city no less, just 15 years after 9/11? Especially when a D.C. cab driver is now on America’s Most Wanted List?
So, the occasional bit of jihad might contribute to some of these folks’ rudeness toward Americans. Noted. But, really, the problem is bigger than that. It has to do with the way the folks at the top of our society are bringing immigrants over, and it has to do with how these immigrants are not assimilating. Because they’re not supposed to.
I’m sympathetic to the plight of the working man, more so than any other reporter in Washington, D.C. (Trust-fund me on that). And since I’m in the same economic bracket as cab drivers, I also know how they live, piled several to a room in downmarket hellholes run by a guy — maybe always the same guy — who asks you how long you’re in the country before he tells you that the Craigslist ad isn’t actually the place he’s selling and you’ll have to find someplace to be Saturday nights when his “cricket buddies” come over. It’s not a glamorous life. I get it.
But you know what? That doesn’t justify acting the way cab drivers act. I don’t have a glamorous life. People try to screw me over and stab me in the back every single day. Since I have nothing to offer them, there’s nothing stopping people from being rude or downright hostile to me, so that’s pretty much all I get. That’s LIFE. That’s the way it is now in our country where four people in the Greater Anaheim area have all the money and everyone else smokes medical marijuana so they don’t have to think about their situation.
But cab drivers don’t get that.
One night not too long ago, I was disrupted from my early-hours political writing by a commotion outside. I went to the window. A cab driver was parked in front of my apartment. A young twentysomething American girl was outside and the cabbie was screaming at her, threatening her, getting up in her face with his pointed finger and howling to Allah about this evil white broad.
“I paid you. I paid you,” she pleaded, terrified.
“Please, sir, this is a young woman. What’s wrong?”
“SHE NO PAY ME. SHE NO PAY ME.”
“Sir, let her go. Drive away. Just drive away.”
He wouldn’t go, and so I threw on my hole-ridden shoes and stumbled down to the street to intervene. The cab driver claimed that she didn’t pay him in full. The reality, so far as I could tell, is that he just didn’t know how to work or read the debit card system on the computer monitor in his backseat, which, so far as I could tell (again, it was late) showed that she had, indeed, paid with a tip.
And it was then I realized why cab drivers are so out of touch with society, so unsympathetic, so Aspergers Syndrome-esque.
When you sit in the back of a cab nowadays as an American, you’re in a little bubble and there’s a television monitor in front of you. As you bound around the streets cutting off old ladies, you in the backseat are completely isolated from all of it. You’re watching “Jimmy Kimmel Live” clips and lame promotional advertisements aimed at tourists. When it’s time to pay, you don’t have to make an actual cash transaction, you just swipe your card in the monitor and then jump out when the screen says “Approved.” At no point in the entire cab ride do you ever actually have to interact with the driver – nor are you encouraged to.
That, my friends, is immigration reform. The rich people sit in the backseat and the servants are invisible. The “I went to Dartmouth” class is completely and utterly removed from the “DREAMer” class. Whether they speak Spanish, Arabic, or some kind of language that just sounds like Ed Schultz on a treadmill strung into lines of verbiage, they live behind a veil. Whether they’re cleaning your obnoxious house, feeding your brat children, or selling you single cigarettes on the street corner, they’re in a different realm. For the rich white people, there’s no guilt, no worries. Human interaction is not required. Just feel good about yourself for helping some poor immigrant live out his American dream.
This is the way the folks at the top — both Democrats and Republicans — are structuring our new society. No wonder Mexicans don’t bother to learn English and they harbor resentment toward “Gringos.” No wonder cab drivers don’t treat their cities with respect. No wonder this jerkwad cab driver was threatening some girl whose only crime was that HE didn’t know how to read a computer monitor.
The people in the backseat are a different species, according to rich people. And any communication between backseat and front is merely transactional.
I diffused the diplomatic incident by giving the guy 10 dollars – which is worth, I assure you, just as much to me as it is to him. Without so much as a thank you, he spit on the sidewalk near my feet and sped away, presumably honking at every car that he passed.
People like me don’t take cabs. People like me don’t participate in the servant-patron immigrant economy. We don’t have the money. But, boy oh boy, do we end up paying for it.