Lesson From a Taxi Cab

I sit in classrooms and lecture halls, with my nose in books, my eyes glued to the computer screen for hours. I think the most important lesson I’ve learned, however, did not come from school, but while sitting in the backseat of a taxicab.

My parents came to visit for a weekend, and after finally hailing a cab in the rain, we headed to a downtown museum exhibit. Our driver seemed pleasant enough, striking up some small talk about his home in Africa and his immigration to the United States nearly 10 years ago. He was making great time and great conversation.

As we neared the light at 97th and Broadway, a black sedan in the middle lane made an illegal left-hand turn and proceeded to stop, right in front of our cab. Stuck between a sidewalk and the cars to our right—the literal incarnation of a rock and a hard place—no choice remained but to hit the car that made the turn.

Visibly shaken, the cab driver first assessed our damage and then the damage of his car, while the driver in the wrong immediately got out of his car and onto his phone. No one was seriously injured, but the crash seriously damaged the front of the taxi.

Aware of his vulnerability, the cab driver approached the driver of the sedan and asked, “Are you going to tell the truth?” The man’s response? “Don’t talk to me.”

At that moment, I felt my heart break. Not only did I see the man who broke the laws of traffic turn out to be an undercover policeman, not only did I see him lie to the New York Police Department officers who arrived on the scene, not only did I see him relay to the other officers that the taxi driver caused the accident, but I saw the taxi driver lose his hope.

He had told us mere minutes before that he came to America in search of a better life. He came to escape the corruption, the crime, and the concerns of his home to start anew in this presumed land of opportunity. As his car crashed into the undercover cop’s mistake on that rainy day, and as his hopes crashed when the police offer did not tell the truth, I saw the literal crashing of this man’s American Dream.

I could not sit idly while injustice and the disheartened driver stared me in the face. My parents and I gave the NYPD officers our statement, knowing that the truth was the only thing that could remedy the situation. The officers thanked us for setting the record straight, assured us that the statements would be processed, and thanked us for waiting for them to show up. “Most people,” he muttered, “Don’t stick around long enough to say what truly happened”.

A few weeks later, my family received a call from the taxi driver thanking us for what we
did that day, for staying at the scene, and for telling the truth. It had, he said, meant so much to him.

Apparently, most people don’t stick around to do the right thing. As Columbia University students and as human beings, it is our duty to stick around. Whether at the scene of an accident where an undercover cop obscures the truth or in the cases of hate crimes and real crimes seen on campus this semester, each student ought to stand up and fight for what is right.

The author is a Barnard College first-year.