The Taxi I Should Have Argued In

The driver said the immigrants were destroying his country.

He said it about ten minutes in. Then he said it again, with "the Muslims" added.

I was in the back seat. Airport to a spa. Long travel day. Speaking job on the other side of a short vacation. I was tired in the specific way that makes you compliant.

I did the hundred-yard stare out the window. When he caught my eye in the mirror I forced a small smile. I made the noises. Mm. Uh huh. Ok.

I did not take out my phone. I told myself I was staying alert in case he got more aggressive. That part was true. About five percent true.

The other ninety-five percent was that I had a massage booked. I had a robe waiting. I did not want to be the foreigner in the back seat lecturing a local guy about his own country at the end of a fourteen-hour day.

So I made the noises. And he kept going.

The math of who was in the car

He picked me. Not for the ride. For the audience.

White guy. American accent. Coming from the airport. Going somewhere expensive. Of every passenger he could have had that afternoon, I was the safest person in his city to say that to. He read me in three seconds and decided I would not make him uncomfortable.

He was right.

That is the part I want to sit with. He was right about me. Before I said anything. Before I made the noises. He looked at me and saw a man who would not push back. And I confirmed it.

What I was practicing

I have a vocabulary for what I did in that taxi. I have a whole industry's worth of it.

I was regulating my nervous system. I was choosing peace over being right. I was observing without judgment. I was setting an internal boundary. I was protecting my energy.

All of those phrases mean the same thing. I was being nice.

Nice is the thing that costs me nothing. Nice is the small smile in the mirror. Nice is mm, uh huh, ok. Nice is the version of me that arrives at the spa on time, undisturbed, with a clean conscience because I did not engage.

Decent is the other thing. Decent would have cost me the ride. It would have cost me the comfort of a stranger's approval. It would have cost me the easy ending to a long day. Decent would have meant saying, quietly, I don't see it that way, and then sitting in twenty more minutes of whatever came back.

I have been sold a lot of language that makes nice sound like decent. I have bought most of it.

The next passenger

I tipped him. I got out. I walked into the spa. The robe was waiting. The massage was good.

Somewhere later that afternoon, or the next morning, another passenger got into that taxi. Maybe a woman in a hijab. Maybe a Somali kid going to work. Maybe an older man whose accent gave him away in the first sentence.

They got the version of him I helped warm up.

He had spent thirty minutes practicing his rant on a passenger who confirmed it was sayable. I did not invent his politics. I did not radicalize him. But I was a small, smiling proof point that he could keep going. That the people he was talking about were the only ones who would push back, and they were not in the car.

I do not know what that next passenger absorbed. I know I was not in the seat anymore.

Where this leaves me

I am not telling you this so you can tell me I was scared. I was a little scared. I am telling you because the scared part is not where the failure lives.

The failure lives in the moments I have not described. The dinners. The work events. The conversations at conferences where another man says something small and I do the same thing I did in the taxi. Smile in the mirror. Make the noises. Tell myself later that I was being strategic.

I do not have a clean answer for what to do next time. I have not yet been the decent man in that scene. I have been the nice one, over and over, and called it wisdom.

If you have a clean answer, I am suspicious of you. If you do not, I think we are in the same taxi.

P.S. The next article in this series asks whether the manosphere is shaping your company culture. The taxi was the personal version of that question. The corporate version is bigger, quieter, and harder to spot. I'll see you Tuesday.