etcetera, etcetera, etcetera…

as the plane buzzed through the crackling clouds, my mind kept returning to break and re-break apart the word: indianapolis. like a kit-kat, indiana-polis; i kept manipulating the two pieces. i don’t know why i was so fascinated. probably because of the trigger polis allowed back to the week’s examination of a city and, using that model, of justice through the eyes of socrates.

i stepped off the plane and dragged my luggage off the belt (i always want to jump on the belt and ride it to the hidden side where they load the luggage. when i was younger i imagined hundreds of little robots working hard to lift and transfer the many pieces. i still want to check it out every time i’m at an airport for the off-chance that my childhood imagination may be confirmed.).

i walked out on to the street. they had a neat way of dealing with taxis. instead of allowing a traffic jam of taxis to evolve in front of the gate, they had a push button mechanism to call taxis. the number of times the red button wash pushed equaled the number of taxis that would show up within a minute from a lot not too far away.

as i stepped into the taxi, socrates came back. what is a more virtuous profession that of a taxi cab driver or of a doctor? since they both earn money and both provide a service is one necessarily “higher”?

the gentleman and i started talking. he was from ethiopia. he had left at an early age though and moved to sudan before coming to the states. he moved first to ohio and for the last decade, he had been in indiana. he asked me if i was muslim. he started telling me of the story of jafar and the king of abyssinia. he said he was orthodox christian, but it didn’t matter. we both believed in the same God, he said. we were brothers who shared the same faith and just differed in practice.

he talked about the cultural differences between america and ethiopia. he seemed distraught. in ethiopia, children would run to greet their father when he came home. here, he said, they are too busy flipping through tv channels. some kids did alright though. his kids had retained their values. they worked hard. america was a real land of opportunity. here it didn’t matter what tribe you were, if you worked hard you could make it. in sudan, he said, you could get killed just because of the family you belonged to.

he asked me where i went to school. this was exactly what he was talking about he said. i had made it despite everything. he hoped his kids would go to good schools. then he commented on education. he said that i could probably read the same books and get the same “knowledge” i was at harvard most other places. what made harvard special was being there. i needed to take advantage of that.

a week ago, yale announced it would start putting some classes online, lectures, readings and syllabus. not only would it try to open its gates in terms of admissions, it decided to try to share as much as it could the “knowledge” it had discovered and created. now anyone, from indianapolis to india can basically take a yale class. harvard should do that too. we should share as much as we can with everyone. knowledge should never be a privilege of the elite.

but something has got to be different between taking the classes online and being there. being here.

at harvard, i feel we still need to define that something. what are we really here for that we aren’t getting elsewhere? and are we really getting it?

i’m pretty sure the driver was as virtuous as any doctor i’ve met.

indiana. polis.