Column For this frequent flier, the skies arent so
friendly
By JOAN
CHITTISTER
This column is being written in midair somewhere over the Atlantic
Ocean en route from South Africa to the United States. These reflections, in
other words, are the by-product of experience. Theyre the culmination of
years of experience, some of it very good, much of it increasingly more
difficult from year to year.
Air travel has changed since the days of half-empty planes and
more localized lifestyles. This particular route took 37 hours to cover the
distance from Erie, Pa., to Johannesburg, South Africa, with a long layover in
Amsterdam. The experience has been a sobering one. It has also raised some
serious questions.
Halfway through the flight I had one of those flashes of memory
that seem to come out of nowhere. If you think long enough, however, a
flashback that at first seems far removed from the circumstances that prompt it
often has some clear relationship to the present situation.
I dont remember where or when it happened, but I do remember
my first tours of old emigrant or prison or slave ships. I was a history
teacher on a field trip, an excursion back into an earlier age or place to help
the children of this generation appreciate other generations long gone. The
visits came complete with guides and educational brochures.
Down in this low, cramped hold, hundreds of people had been
crammed into inhuman positions. The voyage across the Atlantic had been
organized by businesses for commercial profit and made under despicable
conditions. The process, our guidebook said, was uncomfortable to the point of
the unconscionable and indefensible.
The thought of those voyages and that kind of calculated
inhumanity affected me then. It affects me still. Only now, I have discovered,
it is possible that the same sorts of people are still doing the same sorts of
things. The only difference is that now people get to pay for the privilege of
being ferried across the Atlantic under inhuman conditions. They call it air
travel.
Of course, the social motivations and cultural effects of those
situations -- penal policies, slavery and emigration -- are hardly the same,
but at base, the financial crassness of such commercial measures may be too
interestingly similar to be ignored.
Every year airline tickets get more expensive and every year the
experience of flying gets worse. Little by little the aisles have been
narrowed, the seats have been shrunk, the leg room has been squeezed to the
knee caps. If youre holding a book, reading a newspaper, using a computer
or trying to eat a meal when the person in front of you attempts to use one of
those reclining seats that the ads promise, you stand to have the
computer top snapped off the keyboard, the food spilled or the paper squashed
in your face.
That the person next to you will spill over into your lap, too,
you learn to take for granted. After all, the ratio of space to the number of
passengers on an airplane and the ratio of space to people on an 18th- or
19th-century sailing ship must be eerily similar.
The rights of passengers have been largely lost. Airline companies
can oversell tickets with impunity now, but buyers dont dare make a
change of schedule without being charged for the privilege of changing their
minds. If, in fact, they are permitted to change at all.
The company can fail to serve food, whatever the price of the
ticket and the length of the trip. The company can change flights, cancel
flights, merge flights, vary flight fares and end flights with not so much as a
by your leave.
Customers are herded into spaces the likes of which no other
vehicle or restaurant would be permitted to offer by any municipality in the
country. The airline manages to be an equal opportunity highwayman: People in
first class or business class are charged hundreds of dollars extra, if not
thousands, for a normal size seat to which any normal person ought to have an
automatic right. People in economy are charged hundreds of dollars, sometimes
thousands, for seats that are hardly usable.
The problem is not space -- there has always been enough space in
a jumbo jet to accommodate decent-sized seats. No, the problem cant be
design. Its got to be profit, if not greed.
It makes you wonder whether or not the executives who make these
rules have ever tried to live by them. Its time, I think, to pass a law
requiring airline CEOs to fly at least once a week on their airlines
planes. Across the Atlantic. Steerage. On one of their special
no-frills fares that have eliminated not only the full bag of peanuts and full
teaspoons of salt and pepper, but have eliminated full storage bins, full
freedom of movement for the person on the window side of the row, full rations
of air and full human respect, as well.
We managed to outlaw slave ships once, didnt we? Or as Billy
Holiday told us, just because were up to our necks in white lace and
miles away from sugar cane doesnt mean that we arent still on the
plantation.
Benedictine Sr. Joan Chittister, author and lecturer, lives in
Erie, Pa.
National Catholic Reporter, October 2,
1998
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