{"id":5904,"date":"2017-04-10T18:49:45","date_gmt":"2017-04-10T22:49:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.trinitydc.edu\/president\/?p=5904"},"modified":"2017-04-10T18:49:45","modified_gmt":"2017-04-10T22:49:45","slug":"unfriendly-skies","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.trinitydc.edu\/president\/2017\/04\/unfriendly-skies\/","title":{"rendered":"Unfriendly Skies"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

That United Video<\/a>.\u00a0 Who among us can board a plane again without worrying that it might happen to any one of us?\u00a0 Dragged from our seats by the scruff of our necks down the aisle in ignominy because we won’t “volunteer” to give up a seat for which we paid hundreds of dollars because the airline staff made a mistake, or overbooked out of greed, or didn’t plan well enough for how to get their pilots from one city to another (they have other planes, you know…)…\u00a0 The case is made that the “contract of carriage”<\/a> permits these gigantic corporations to deny seats to paying customers… it’s there in the fine print way down in the stuff you don’t read when you book your trip.\u00a0 But the legalese does not include “assault and humiliation” as part of the Faustian bargain of modern air travel.<\/p>\n

We live in a bewildering world — a primitive dogfight looming just off to the side every day even as we are surrounded by extraordinary wealth and vast technology.\u00a0 None of us knows when our thin mantles of dignity and intellectual pride will be torn to shreds by officious agents of our dystopian nightmares.\u00a0 It’s not the fictional 1984, it’s the real 2017 slouching toward deepening anxiety and declining freedom, respect and simple courtesy.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>(airport screening at Dulles, photo credit<\/a>)<\/p>\n

Folks, I don’t know about you, but I’ve recently realized that when I have to fly anywhere I become an entirely different person.\u00a0 I admit it.\u00a0 I get a little depressed, feel somewhat introverted, worry about long lines and being manhandled by some TSA agent for no other reason than that I have a bit of extra padding, if you know what I mean (yes, this has happened more than once to me!).\u00a0 I don’t make eye contact.\u00a0 I try to avoid crowds, which is almost impossible in an airport.\u00a0 I keep my head down.\u00a0 I get to a good seat at the gate and will sit there for hours just so I don’t have to be in the scrum when they start boarding.\u00a0 I’ve started doing something even worse, much worse — and don’t worry, Trinity, I pay for all of this myself — I upgrade to get a better seat.\u00a0 Ugh.\u00a0 Yikes.\u00a0 I’ve become the person I used to resent on the airplane!<\/p>\n

I also drive a lot more — used to be if I could get there in six hours, then ten, now I’ll take a whole day on either side if I can get to my destination in a car.<\/p>\n

It didn’t use to be this way.\u00a0 When I first started flying for my job as a young development officer nearly 40 years ago I loved every minute.\u00a0 Airport glamour.\u00a0 Fly the friendly skies.\u00a0 Eastern Shuttle to “LaGwage” and back twice a week.\u00a0 Trains, are you kidding, those are for people with mundane lives.\u00a0 I was a jet setter!\u00a0 Loved it.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

(Dulles at dusk: photo credit<\/a> Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority)<\/p><\/div>\n

I loved trekking to Dulles for a west coast flight — the gorgeous sweep of Eero Saarinen’s terminal looking like it, too, could soar into the clouds at any moment.\u00a0 And those funky mobile lounges!\u00a0 They were worth their own trips!<\/p>\n

Now a trip to Dulles presages a descent into the manmade hell of post-9\/11 air travel.\u00a0 Down, down we go into a sterile subterranean landscape of frosted glass and long lines feeding into screening machines and grim-faced agents with blue gloves the better to pat you down, my dear.\u00a0 We are naked in the screening machine and exhausted by the worry that maybe something will go wrong this time, maybe there’s some Kafkaesque plotline in which we all become Gregor Samsa by the time we get through the machine.<\/p>\n

We have accepted all of the brutal airport security hassles and humiliations as part of what’s necessary to protect us from terrorists ever seizing control of airplanes again to commit mass murder and inflict a prolonged national psychosis that’s more than fear of individual death, it’s fear of the shattering of civilization.\u00a0 But the shards of civilization are all around us already.\u00a0 In our very quest for security we have empowered a mindset and culture that gives license to agents of power, mostly big men with guns and kevlar vests and baseball caps ready and willing to dislodge each and every one of us from our simple routines and necessary trips to relatively modest locales like Louisville.\u00a0 The man on the plane was a doctor trying to get to Louisville to see a patient.\u00a0 But United Airlines in its wisdom decided that the doctor was not nearly as important as its own staff, so the doctor had to give up his seat for the corporate staff.<\/p>\n

But worse, much worse, the corporate agents decided that the doctor was less than a human being worthy of respect and care; that the man was simply an object that had to be removed, like a piece of luggage blocking the aisle.\u00a0 The video of those police officers dragging that man up the airplane aisle is something we cannot unsee.\u00a0 It is a statement of how dehumanized we have become, particularly in airports and on airplanes, and how far corporate behavior has fallen to the point where a customer and a terrorist are treated as equal kinds of problems to be solved by brute force.<\/p>\n

I’m thinking about my next trip and looking at Googlemaps to see if I can get there and back in time for the rest of my life.\u00a0 Travel was supposed to be simply a means to get from here to there; but the perils of air travel now overshadow the time commitment and purpose of the trip, itself.\u00a0 And this\u00a0 has nothing to do with the dangers of flying, itself. Those are nothing compared to the dangers of dealing with the the people who run the unfriendly skies.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

An airline decides that its passenger is not a human being worthy of care and respect, but nothing more than a stray piece of luggage to be dragged down the aisle. More road trips, less air travel for me!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":51,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[1792,1793,50,1791],"class_list":["post-5904","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-air-travel","tag-airport-screening","tag-airport-security","tag-united-airlines"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.trinitydc.edu\/president\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5904","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.trinitydc.edu\/president\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.trinitydc.edu\/president\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.trinitydc.edu\/president\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/51"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.trinitydc.edu\/president\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5904"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.trinitydc.edu\/president\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5904\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.trinitydc.edu\/president\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5904"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.trinitydc.edu\/president\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5904"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.trinitydc.edu\/president\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5904"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}