Making a Stranger’s Day

Click here for a video clip about a passenger helping out an Uber driver in trouble. When I watched it, it reminded me of a similar experience I had several years ago.

Here’s my story…

I was getting a haircut in NYC. Through the plate-glass window of the barbershop, I could see a young Black guy pleading with a pair of cops. My barber followed my gaze.

“That’s the young man that cleans all the storefront windows in this area,” he said. “A nice kid. He works hard.”

“I’ll be right back,” I said.

I went outside to see what was going on. A small crowd had gathered, taking in the scene. “I think they’re impounding his car,” one of them told me.

“For what?” I asked.

He shrugged. “Sounds like he didn’t pay a bunch of tickets.”

The kid looked frantic. He was pacing back and forth. “I need my car for my work,” he said. “Please! I’m going to pay those tickets.”

“You got the money?” one of the cops asked.

“No. But I will get it,” he said. “Just don’t take the car.”

The cop began writing him up, and his partner walked back to the squad car. I went over to him and asked if they would let the kid go if I paid his tickets. He looked at me as if he thought I was crazy.

“I’m serious,” I said.

He looked through his paperwork. The total is X,” he said. X was a lot of money. More than I expected. But I happened to have almost exactly that in my pocket, because I had just come from the bank.

He pulled his partner aside, spoke to him for a few minutes, then came back to me.

“Are you sure you wanna do this?” he asked.

“I am,” I said.

He motioned for me to follow him, and we quietly made the transaction behind his car. I thought about asking for a receipt but decided against it. He walked back to his partner and whispered something to him. Then he said something to the kid, and the kid started screaming and jumping up and down. “I knew it!” he shouted. “There is a god! There is a god!”

He searched the faces in the crowd to see if he could figure out who to thank. But I was already halfway down the street. I don’t believe in a god, but that made my day.

Nicaragua? Yes, Nicaragua! 

On Tuesday, I told you about the results of a Gallup poll that listed Nicaragua as the “No. 1 country where people say they are ‘always’ or ‘almost always’ at peace.”

Nicaragua? Surprising? At first, yes. I was surprised. For the reasons I mentioned on Tuesday. But when I thought about the hundreds of Nicaraguan people I’ve lived with and worked with over the past 25+ years, I realized that I shouldn’t have been.

Nicaraguans are, by far, happier than Americans or Europeans or Middle Easterners or people in many of the Asian countries I know. The only people I’ve known that I’d say were happier than Nicaraguans were the Chadian people when I lived and worked there. And Chad, at that time, was one of the five poorest countries in the world.

You are no doubt familiar with the commonly quoted research on the correlation between wealth and happiness. It showed that once people have enough money to pay for their basic needs, the acquisition of more money does not directly affect their level of happiness. We usually understand “basic needs” to mean food and shelter, as well as plumbing, electricity, transportation, and so on. But that’s only true for wealthy countries. In poor countries, the basics truly are basic. A wooden shack and a well somewhere nearby is enough to make millions and millions of people happy with their lives.

And if this is true, why do we believe that (a) being poor is always and bad thing, and (b) helping poor people get richer is always a good thing?