I Guess Not

I am a painfully shy person.

This poses many challenges of course, especially because I have put myself in a very un-shy profession, which forces me not only to speak in front of thousands of strangers daily, it constantly brings me into the company of people I have never met before.

It is difficult for me to have conversations, which is something that I am actively seeking to change. Whenever I am put in a situation where I am sharing a space with someone I don’t know, I try to get to know them, almost aggressively, as if I could make up for all those years of self imposed isolation.

It is strange how we can be solitary in the midst of crowds of people. I have lived this way for my entire life. Aloneness is not an uncomfortable thing for me, in fact, it feels a bit too much like home. So I attempt to venture out as much as I can. Of course, there is a natural resistance to it, but fighting my own nature in this case I believe is a positive thing. Besides, I am learning a tremendous amount.

I was driving into New York City last night, and the guy taking me was amongst the countless people we routinely ignore every day. He was young, obviously foreign, the driver – it is always seemingly okay to talk about people in certain service professions such as the driver or the maid – as if they are somehow not people, but their job. They go unseen, and yet many of them have fascinating lives, extraordinary adventures to tell of. It is like they are part of a mystical realm, that they have slipped into these quiet, silent identities to go undercover. The incognito of lower class employment is an effective cloak for any dagger one might wish to hide. These are those who we do not think of, look at, talk to, yet these are those who have made vast differences and shaped the world, at least their part of it, immensely.

My young friend had an Albanian accent, which I would not have discerned as Albanian, unless he told me he had come from there. He worked 12 hours a day and got stuck in traffic that clients he picked up late would never understand. He didn’t like New York because it was too fast, too hard, too expensive of a city, admittedly a wonderland, but only for the rich and idle. He regretted that the life here changed people, that Albanian girls he once knew as modest and proper were now showing their legs without a care, but he could look at them and in a moment their confidence would dissipate, for their common culture and upbringing would shine like a sudden spotlight beaming down from overhead and shock them into the temporary blindness of truth.

He is Muslim and he loves his faith, yet cannot make the time for prayer when he is trying to negotiate a town car through Midtown at rush hour. He doesn’t understand why the Republicans are going to descend on the city that they conveniently forgot. Lots of New Yorkers are enraged that Bush is using 9/11 as a major bargaining chip in his campaign, arming himself with NYC beloved like Guiliani and trying to make the election all about his personal crusade against terror, when in fact Bush all but abandoned the city after the tragedies, stiffing them on funding, opposing the creation of a 9/11 commission, and then refusing to testify once it was formed.

My friend wants to know how a man that claims to be “of God” can possibly do so much evil in God’s name. He asks, “Isn’t George Bush afraid of God?”

I guess not.

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