This past week I had the fright of watching what happens when personal crisis (if you can call it that) strikes the character of the average american today.
We were flying back from NYC (to Atlanta) when the weather turned bad and our flight was delayed. We boarded the plane about an hour late and ended up sitting on the tarmac for over 3 hours before our plane took off.
Inconvenient? Very.
Uncomfortable? Extremely.
Justification to lose self-control? Ummmm, not so much…
And yet, that’s what happened. As we sat there people lost the ability to control themselves. Their actions, tempers, courteousness, and human decency left the building plane.
This wasn’t a crisis, it was a mere inconvenience! And yet, people acted as if they had been personally wronged and slighted. People all around us talking about how they were going to be writing Airtran a very explicit letter describing the ‘horror’ of this flight as one woman put it. Horror? Really?
It’s been too good. We’ve had it WAY too good. To see people lose self control like they did and treat others the way they did revealed a shallowness to our character that must be remedied. Maybe this recession is not enough. Maybe it’s going to take a deeper, more serious wake up call that life isn’t about our/your personal comfort.
All in all, it was disturbing and all I could really think is ‘dang, we really have had it too good…’
Buzz it!
wow… 3 hours locked in a tube is a long time though. Wow.
I once had an old man give me a dirty, ‘so you’re the reason we haven’t left yet’ because our flight was extremely delayed and volunteered to give up my seat, since they overbooked. Well, it looks like they had room, but the lady at the counter did not inform me of this so they were waiting 5 minutes for me to get on the flight.
People can get pretty cranky when it comes to travel and especially in planes.
It’s a bummer.