Conversation with a Taxi Driver

When we were returning to London's Heathrow Airport this past Monday for our much awaited return home, we fell into conversation with our vehicle's driver about our trip -- what we'd seen (what? You didn't ride on a double-decker?) , what had taken our fancy (Westminster Abbey, certainly, and the Tower of London complex), what had surprised us (the multiple different accents of the native British, and the multiple foreign languages in use), what had charmed us (standing on Westminster Bridge, listening to Big Ben, feeling its tones resonate through us, thinking: This isn’t a recording, this isn’t a movie, this is the actual Big Ben, the one you heard in the audio clips from World War Two). And then we got onto the subject of the US Presidential elections (the driver thought that Bush would win despite Iraq). That led to a shallow detur into the concept of terrorism, when he told us a couple of things that surprised us.

For one, he insisted that the Al-Qaeda organization was unable to work effectively in Britain because that the British security organization, which he thought might still be called MI-5, had instituted a program to permeate public places with their own undercover personnel, who were alert to activities that were out of the norm. For example, he said, if you went to a shopping mall and simply sat and watched the people, you would see that there were some apparent shoppers who came and went repeatedly, carrying the same packages, going in the same direction as before, again and again. I thought it possible, but also possible that they were simply disorganized shoppers. The proof would be if you came back day after day and noted them -- by which time, if they truly were undercover policemen, they would have noticed you.

But the thing he said that really surprised us was that he thought that for all of the diversity of thought and opinion in Britain, there was a commonality of hope and support for the country as a whole. He thought that it would be inconceivable for most British people, no matter how they felt, politically, to foster or foment damage to the country, because it is their home, and they would simply not be able to harm it, or to help others to harm it. He was sure that terrorist organizations existed in Britain, but because of that basic core support for the country, he doubted it would be able to ever amount to anything.

This struck us as a remarkably naive view, but we hoped that he was right.