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This Christmas You’ll Face Airline Tyranny: Time for a Revolution?

This Christmas You’ll Face Airline Tyranny: Time for a Revolution?

Last updated on: March 12, 2015 at 5:35 pm by Frank Schaeffer

This Christmas You’ll Face Airline Tyranny: Time for a Revolution? 2015-03-12T17:35:20-06:00 Frank Schaeffer

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(those were the days!)

I have been flying a lot, really A LOT. In the last ten weeks I’ve taken fifteen cross-country trips. That’s thirty flights plus, because several trips involved flying through hubs and changing planes. (I’m on an author tour for a new bookWHY I AM AN ATHEIST WHO BELIEVES IN GOD: How to give love, create beauty and find peace.)

I’m noticing something disturbing: the mentality of our post-9/11 security state is creeping into the non-security-related parts of travel.

This creep is motivated by greed. Airlines act as if they are agents for the state, not corporations serving clients. They expect to be obeyed.

Passengers are at fault too. We take our obedience to the TSA agents telling us to strip, stand still, and remove this and that from our carry-on luggage into the entire experience of travel. We go like sheep if not exactly to slaughter, then at least like sheep stripped of basic civil and consumer rights to accept gross discomfort and abject servility.

The airlines are using our national state of paranoia to do to customers what no other industry could dream of doing. We’re told that “federal law” mandates that we obey the airline personnel’s instructions. This applies to no smoking onboard, following instructions “in case of an emergency,” and so forth.

Fair enough. But the airline people issue their orders these days in a manner and tone that makes it seem as if the full weight of the law backs them up in every detail of pushing around us consumers. They also invent new rules that help them take every last penny they can shake from us.

For instance, they take away free check-in of luggage, then inform everyone boarding a flight that if they want to get to that coveted overhead compartment early enough to find space for their roller bag, they need to pay extra to guarantee early boarding as a “Zone 1” or Ruby-or-Gold-what-have-you passenger. Leg room? None. Solution? Pay extra, and we’ll seat you in a special section built for humans.

I’m 62. I’ve flown millions of miles, starting as a child flying off to boarding school, alone. I’ve known pre-security check-in, moderate to heavy security, and now this: max security and max airline rudeness. Like the proverbial story about the frog placed in cold water that is incrementally heated until it dies without noticing what’s been done, I’m wondering if we passengers will ever say ENOUGH!?

For instance who says we have to obey the airline’s hierarchal social structure as they enforce their economic class system? To board a plane today is to be made acutely aware of just where you stand on the social pecking order. First Class passengers of course board first.

Understood. Then come Gold, Platinum, Ruby, and Priority, followed by Zones 1 to 5—whatever. By Zone 2 we’re being told to check our roll-on bags. The system seems to have been designed by Ayn Rand or one of her clones. The rich get richer; the rest of us 99 percent can just go to hell.

The officiousness of the boarding class system is enforced in a no-nonsense way that implies that this new airline class system too is federal law in action. Try boarding with the wrong group, and you’ll be told to wait like a naughty child being sent to a “time out.” Try walking on anyway, as if you are an American citizen with rights or even just a consumer expecting service, and I’ll bet the gate agent calls the cops.

Once on the plane, the aisle is blocked for half the flight by a drink cart from which the airline will sell you a snack. Access to the toilets at the rear is thus mostly blocked. Try using the First Class toilet, and you are sent back having been more or less told that this toilet isn’t for the likes of you.

Who says?

I’d like to see what would happen if we travelers just refused point blank to obey non-security related orders. Would the airport police arrest a traveler that decided to board a plane with Group 1 when they were in Group 2? And what about on board? Say I’m hungry and walk up to First Class and ask a passengers there if she’ll share half a sandwich? Will I be restrained by other passengers as if I’m the shoe bomber and then arrested when we land? I have the feeling I would be.

**Ironically the actual arm of the law—the TSA—**has done what it can to accommodate travelers at the very same time as airlines are acting more and more like bully cops who want to be bribed not to beat you up, or at least let you have enough leg room! I signed up for the TSA “Pre-Check” program. I get to leave on my belt and shoes now, and my laptop can stay in its case! It’s a testimony to my browbeaten travel-weariness that I find this small intervention on my behalf absurdly uplifting.

How about some non-threatening, very polite, civil disobedience by consumers? I’m working up my courage to board with Zone 1 even if I’m not a Ruby, Platinum, or Gold customer! And I dream of a day I’m brave enough to use the First Class toilet when for the third time, the aisle to the rear is blocked and I HAVE to pee. Arrest me or at least offer me a Platinum, Gold, or Priority One early urination club I can join

… for a small fee.

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Frank Schaeffer is a writer. His latest book —WHY I AM AN ATHEIST WHO BELIEVES IN GOD: How to give love, create beauty and find peace

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