"We had one prime minister," my driver said, "he had 57 houses! 57 houses! He took money from Europe. The money came to help farmers, but did it go to farmers? No. The prime minister and the people in government, they buy small olive farms and then they give all the money to themselves."
This was the second time this particular driver had picked me up from the airport – the last being in December when she was far less sharing. Being the car service's only female driver, I imagine she has to be a little more cautious picking up strangers late at night. Or she just takes some time to warm up. But last night, she felt comfortable enough to engage in a lot of conversation between the airport and my hotel in town.
It started with the driver wanting to understand the protests in Los Angeles and developed into her political worldview which I can't classify cleanly in American terms or even Greek ones as I understand them. She feels Palestinians need more aid, but has no problem with Iran being bombed. She likes protesting in general and has admiration for some of Greece's early nationalist leaders – including some of the communists. She doesn't Greece's membership in the European Union has been beneficial and especially not being part of the Eurozone.
Ukraine gets too much attention. It's really a battle between the EU and Russia for Ukraine's natural resources and Greece gives more than it can afford to the cause. Perhaps if the EU hadn't tried to make ties stronger with Ukraine, Putin wouldn't have invaded.
But the theme she hit over and over again is that only Greece cares about Greece. Development money from Germany and the EU put Greece in debt and she and the next two generations will be paying back money the country might have been fine without. The cost of goods got much higher on the Euro (this is something I've heard repeatedly in Greece and France), too many immigrants make their way to Greece through the EU and Greece's resources aren't being used to benefit its own people enough.
I learned a long time ago, taxi driver perspectives are important. I've learned a lot about the cities and countries I've visited through driver chit-chat. Sometimes it's just little things about a city – its districts and good places to visit. One driver in Singapore kept trying to talk my cousin Jacob and I into getting prostitutes – which we both found a little offensive and curious. But in most cases – and in Singapore in particular – drivers can teach a lot. If not always in exact facts and accuracy, then in sentiment and perspective about what working people experience.
There's one taxi driver I rode with once almost twenty years ago in Singapore who I wish I could interview today. He began driving around the time Singapore declared independence and could tell the story of what it was like to go through those initial scary and unstable years. His view of the government was highly positive and felt people who weren't there couldn't understand exactly what it all meant – how much Singapore was built on hard work and made it by the skin of everyone's teeth.
In March 2022, a taxi driver here in Athens told me how Ukraine really was being run by Nazis and so Russia had to stop them. That seemed a little less credible that last night's driver.
My friend Alex recently reminded me that on social media, people's posts can be factually wrong or seem far-fetched – but there's usually a truth behind the post. People are sharing their truths even when they have the facts wrong or their perspective may be skewed.
When I'm abroad, I'm very patient with people's perspectives. Sitting in someone's taxi or chatting at a cafe, I'm open to whatever someone has to say (within reason). I don't have to subscribe, I just want to collect all the data because it tells me something about the person, their culture, the times and perspectives I may never have encountered.
This is much harder for me at home. When it's one's own culture and country, it's hard not to be part of the battle for the overarching narrative. History is made less of facts than of stories and largely all our political and social discourse – or bickering – or worse – is a battle for whose story prevails as THE story. Whether conscious of it or not, we try to persuade others to adopt a perspective we can at least find acceptable and if enough people we know or can reach start to buy into an agreeable story, we generally feel better.
While everyday, everywhere at all times the battle for THE story takes place daily – it seems every few decades we have a period when the battles intensify. Socially and politically we reach a crossroads and upheaval ensues. The 1960's and early 1970's were such a time. And we're in one again. So many people are incredulous over the gap between their story and other people's stories. It's like witnesses to a traffic accident who completely honestly all report different stories.
I could write chapters instead of a blog post about all the reasons this phenomenon is so intense right now. Certainly – and perhaps foremost – the technology around our communication plays a giant role. Social media not only allows for new forms of more broadly available and distributed discourse, but also opens pathways for bad actors to spread disinformation. Foreign powers, terrorists and a hard working plumber in upstate New York all have a forum never before available to them in this way. The results are so myriad that researchers across many disciplines have full-time jobs just accounting for them.
As Yuval Noah Harari says, the world has become so complex almost no one in it really knows how all the systems work. We are a population of increasingly specialized people who don't always know where our cog fits among the vast machinery.
My driver friend from last night was a kind, older woman who seems to really want her country to do well and serve its citizens. Not everything she said is completely factually accurate. Some of it may be accurate, but when more context is added, other conclusions might make more sense. And some of it is spot-on. The immigration policies of any one EU country affects the immigration of all – so while Greece and Germany are free to pursue separate visa and residency requirements, movement within the EU is unrestricted and there's really no ensuring a Syrian immigrant admitted to Germany doesn't end up on a street in Athens.
"I used to be able to buy enough food for my house for an entire month of 7,000 drachmas. That's the same as 20 Euros. Then the Euro came along and now I spend 20 Euros just for toilet paper!"
There's actually a lot to unpack. I'm not sure the cost of toilet paper today and the value of the drachma in 2002 are a clean comparison. But the bigger truth that the cost of living is much higher today and that Greeks struggle more to make ends meet – that's real. Or to put in Reagan-esque terms, Are you better off today than you were 23 years ago? The answer for a lot of people in the Eurozone might be "no". Or the answer is "yes" but they can't see it for many reasons – in no small part because we get used to new benefits and forget what we did without before. My driver was using a smartphone that helped her navigate from the airport to my hotel with whose location she was unfamiliar. She probably didn't have a mobile phone in 2002 and she certainly couldn't FaceTime her grandkids whenever she liked.
Still, I get it – I'm old enough now to remember when I was in high school and gas cost 99 cents a gallon. If I measured my economic well-being in strictly inflationary terms, I too might have some serious gripes. If I made fewer dollars per year, then it would be all the more true. We're living in inflationary times – so it's easy to get caught in that perspective. And that perspective isn't wrong – it's just not all there is.
Interestingly, I can write about my driver's perspectives with cool dispassion. I'm not a voter in Greece. Her story and mine have intersected for two 35 minute drives six months apart. If she wants to convince everyone she can that Greece should leave the EU and ditch the Euro, what do I care? (I mean I do a little because I'm generally pro-EU and monetary policy would be a hard thing for Greece to take back at this point – but I care up to the point that I finish this parenthetical).
Why is it at home when someone I know, love, care about says something I find factually misfounded or tries to convince people of ideas I find worrisome, I get so stressed? Because I'm in the fight for the story. Sometimes I care more and other times less. But I'm closer to the story and its ramifications. In fact, the closer I am to a person, the harder it is to simply relax and take in their story as interesting datapoints.
But maybe I should? Maybe it's worth trying to hear people's truths more than their facts? Maybe then I would better be able to craft my own narrative and to do my part to fight for THE story in the best way possible?
"The world is upside down right now," my driver said. And on that point, with no qualifications, we could agree.
