Do we travel just so we can come home again?
This question seemed to be answered in the affirmative by the faces my traveling companion (MTC) and I looked into when we took a journey to a European country not long ago. They were the faces of the doomed, shipmates being brought from below deck to walk a plank from starboard.
Who wouldn’t want to be home instead of in an airport? The foul air, the penitentiary lighting, herded here and there, asked to remove your shoes, your belt — and my shirt and pants at Brussels airport (more later) — shepherded by people working too many hours for not enough pay and who couldn’t really care less when the next flight to Belgium is leaving. Everything is criminally expensive and then they go it one better by strapping you down for six hours in a seat sized for a 6-year-old, and then hurtle you across a bleak ocean while forcing you to watch Adam Sandler. Home? Hell, just let the plane crash in the freezing sea and end this whole thing now.
This is all due to the current American business model, which reasons that even though companies are in an industry to serve the public, service is the last consideration. Late-stage American capitalism’s motto is “Bottom Line, Baby!” and consultancies with names like Engulf & Devour are fast-tracking consolidations and mergers, leaving a few C-suite pirates cutting, squeezing and grinning.
But I wasn’t like MTC and our fellow convicts, sorry, passengers, on our last journey. I can bear the pains of getting from here to there (although Mr. Sandler must be stopped). I don’t care where we’re going, I’m going with a smile on my face. Anywhere. Give me the key to the highway and show me a sign. Hand me down my travelin’ shoes. Pack the bag, lock the door behind me. Let’s get out of here. (I got itchy feet early. When I was a kid, my parents would pack us all in the car every summer and we were gone. I saw all of the lower 48 by the time I was 16.)
MTC thinks I’m just being perverse about horrid travel conditions; you know, trying to come off as a superior person, an above-it-all aristocrat, a stoic who will never let them see me sweat, while she stakes out a position of outrage at being treated as less-than-human cargo.
A lesson for someone accompanying a person who is beyond fed up about the 2-year-old boy in the seat behind her, screaming — think banshees, professional funeral mourners — as he deliriously throws his toys up over her seat back and onto her head. The lesson? Never tell a loved one in this situation to “relax.”
That demonic little boy, by the way, caused MTC to move to an empty seat in the rear of the cabin where she started to drown in sleep. But woke to the boy and his smiling mother in the empty seats next to her. Woke to a cloth doll flung at her followed by open-mouthed cacophony. (Refrain also from saying, “He’s just a kid.”)
When I was picked out of the line at Brussels airport and taken to a little room, it was not an unusual occurrence. I’m usually asked to accompany officials to a little room. It might be because years ago I spent time in the north of Ireland where a war was ongoing and would travel quite a bit, so perhaps British, Irish Republic and American authorities thought I was some sort of bad lad. But now? I’m probably still in a database fitting the profile of a member of Geezer Terrorists International.
Anyway, an unsmiling Belgian security official took me to the little room, frisked me — “frisk” is the wrong word, I mean this guy laid hands on every inch of me like he was waxing his car — and then asked me quietly to remove my pants and shirt.
Source: The Suffolk Times
