Never Forget Who Screwed Up All the Planes
The reason you are eating Qdoba in Phoenix this holiday season is a very rich man who takes a private jet.
The United States relies on air travel to a greater extent than any other nation on earth. That’s a bit of a mushy statement, but it rings true to me: no other country has our population and our size and our near-total disregard for alternate forms of long-distance transportation. Even Russia has trains. India has trains. Don’t get me started on China. And in many parts of those countries, people’s lives do not regularly involve trips to the other side of the country. The U.S. has oriented its society around an internal migration-friendly service economy where it is a pretty standard for people to have to do stuff like, for instance, fly home to visit family over Thanksgiving. In other countries you a) don’t have Thanksgiving and b) can usually just take a train. The trains are fast and/or consistent. They do not, largely, rely on a highly specialized workforce of several thousand key individuals positioned all over the country who are, due to other bizarre quirks of our broken down social system, uniquely dependent on the direct functioning of the federal government.
In America, though, we have all that. We have a bunch of people who do the job of telling planes where to go, something that is incredibly difficult and stressful, and a bunch of other people who have spent years of their life learning to fly the planes, and all of them are bound by a dense system of rules and regulations set up by a government that is currently shut down because a cabal of special interest groups have paid enormous amounts of money to elected officials to strip healthcare from millions of Americans and funnel them deeper into extractive private sector systems. I think that we need to be clear about that whole bit. The reason, right now, that you might be reading this blog while in somewhere like Newark, or Denver, in between checking your email for a meal voucher to like, Qdoba or something, because your Delta pilot timed out halfway through a two-leg trip to Tacoma and now you have been sitting at gate D15 for six hours — all of that is because there are people who run healthcare companies that want to make more money.
