Videos of an elderly man dragged down the aisle and off a United Airlines flight on Sunday have now gone viral.
“The facts are there are too many people for the number of seats and somebody has to leave.” So said former United Continental CEO Gordon Bethune on CNBC. He makes it sound like a freak of nature or some astrological peculiarity: “Well, where did all those people come from?”
But in actual fact, the only reason there were that number of people is that the airline had sold that number of seats.
When no ticket holders accepted United’s offer of travel vouchers to give up their seats, United should have had to raise its offer until the market cleared the desired number of seats. Somehow the State has empowered airlines so that they can ignore what would otherwise be the ticket owners’ property rights.
And so instead of cooperative social and commercial relationships, we revert to coercive ones in which seat holders can be dragged kicking and screaming off their flights.
Bethune displayed the disdain that such State-favored vendors (just like so many in the State’s healthcare industry) have for their customers. He repeatedly referred to the displaced passenger as “immature.” “He did not want to cooperate,” according to Bethune, who said the passenger, when “asked” to leave the plane, “should handle it in a different way.”
“The staff had asked him to voluntarily leave and he refused,” he said, then likening the passenger to “a child.”
NBC and other news sources refer to a Chicago Police Department statement also saying the man was “asked” to leave the flight.
To be “asked” is to be requested; it implies the right to decline or refuse the request.
If we wish to restore some clarity to this age of confusion, the proper use of words is a good place to begin.
If we allow the language to be used imprecisely and say this passenger was merely “asked” to leave, then he can be thought uncooperative, childish, selfish, and immature. He is petulant and to blame for the altercation. The average TV viewer may well think of him as exactly the kind of person you don’t want as a neighbor.
But if we face squarely what happened, that through no fault or wrongdoing of his own he was ordered off a flight that he was entitled to be on, his behavior takes on a much different — and admirable — appearance. He is standing up to “the man.” He is courageously defending his rights — and ultimately ours — against a powerful establishment.
As Orwell put it, “One ought to recognize that the present political chaos is connected with the decay of language, and that one can probably bring about some improvement by starting at the verbal end.”
7:29 pm on April 10, 2017
