The Complicated Ethics of Coming Unhinged

Or, Male Karen Completely Loses It (Again)

Greetings, friends! We’re back! Apologies for the lag in posts over the last several months. I (Jon Busch) have been taking courses at Fuller Seminary and putting most of my writing energy into academic papers following a 20-year hiatus from being a student. Meanwhile, our other very different Jon (Fitzgerald) has been hard at work writing a series of columns for a slightly-more-popular site, Mashable, and serving as a member of the board of directors of a new, local online newspaper called The Swampscott Tides (way to keep journalism alive, Fitz!). All this in addition to molding the minds of our youth at Salem State University.

During my recent visit to New England, more than one friend (aka two friends) asked what had happened to the newsletter, and that was enough to inspire me to take In Progress off the shelf and start posting afresh. I’ll start with a lighthearted meditation on the barely suppressed rage I feel in common consumer contexts, and I’ve got some other drafts in the cooker that should come your way soon. Thank you all for sticking with us across our many extended hiatuses. While I can’t guarantee we won’t have more of those, it’s so nice to have this little community of thoughtful readers to come back to. We appreciate you all! Stay tuned!

Every time I see a headline about some “unhinged” airline passenger losing his or her shit, I wonder, “How long until that’s me?”.

Tackled in the aisle. Duct-taped to the seat. Met by police at the gate.

Because if there is one thing I consistently want to do when traveling by air, it’s flip the F out.

Of course, it’s not socially acceptable to come unhinged. Unhinged people are almost invariably framed as the ‘bad guys’. And to be fair, I would probably be objectively in the wrong to let my rageful impulses get the better of me on a flight.

But I have to say that the entire experience of air travel seems deliberately designed to push our respective hinges to the brink.

I don’t need to rehash the reasons: the long lines, the cramped seats, the packed terminals, the various little indignities; the way the prices mysteriously rise if you browse for a flight one day and then come back to book it the next, or how you need to pay extra to make sure you can sit with your own children. All that stuff.

After all that, when you sit on a tarmac waiting to take off for an hour because of ‘traffic,’ then arrive to find your gate is occupied, and so you’ll have to sit on that tarmac until they have room, you might be forgiven for thinking, I bought these tickets eight months ago; they clearly knew we were coming; what gives here?

But heaven forbid you betray any sense of aggrievedness to anyone who works for the airline. In that instant, you become “unhinged”; you become the villain. Which seems awfully convenient for them.

Here’s something else:

I was at Red Rocks the other night, AKA the greatest music venue in the country, to see Beck with the Colorado Symphony Orchestra (!). Can you imagine? We were so excited. We had a pair of GA tickets, but 60+, 70+, 80+ rows from the stage, there was still nowhere to sit in the bleacher-style seats. I asked probably 20 different people if we could squeeze in next to them, and they all said no. They were saving the seats, or someone had just gone to the bathroom or for a drink. Sorry.¹

My date (AKA my wife) and I split up to scout more efficiently. With her gone, I felt even less need to hide my disgruntledment. At one point, venue staff appeared. A woman and I both complained loudly to each-other-but-clearly-to-them about not being able to find a place to sit. I expressed my frustration at having paid quite a bit for tickets and having no place to be. I didn’t yell or curse, but I wasn’t nice about it either. One of the dudes said I should’ve got there earlier because “it’s general admission.” I blurted some gripe about people saving seats with hats and water bottles. If I were a bit sharper, I might’ve pointed out that had I gotten there earlier, it would just be some other poor couple who had no place to sit; maybe the problem was that they had sold more tickets than there were seats, not that I was “late.”²

So yeah, I started getting mad. When someone told me a seat was saved, I’d snap, “Of course it is!” and move on.³ One couple started saying something about how a guy had just gone off, and I said, “Yeah, yeah… I get it,” and kept on moving. But they called after me, “No, no! He’s not coming back. You can sit here!”

I was stunned, shook even. I told them how grateful I was. I asked the guy if I could give him a hug. He readily accepted, and after a warm embrace, we introduced ourselves.

After calling and flagging down Heidi to come and join us, I immediately began to feel guilty and embarrassed about my snippiness with the venue staff and my fellow concertgoers.⁴ And that shame lingered off and on throughout the show.

It is embarrassing, coming “unhinged.” Everyone else is following “the rules,” so why can’t you? Those flight attendants working the aisles, those ushers working the stands, those concessions people charging you $18 for a Coors… they’re just doing their jobs, man; you can’t be mean to them.

This is all just “the way it is.” And if you come unhinged about things simply being the way they are, what does that say about you?

But of course, the people who set the outrageous beer prices, oversell the venue, oversell the flight, etc., are not people you will ever meet IRL; they remain conveniently removed from the impacts their decisions have on people day-to-day. And it is a societal requirement that we patrons always be kind and polite to the customer service folks with whom we engage.

With this arrangement, it seems to me that “the way it is” will never change. Unless, of course, people stop showing up to see their favorite bands (unlikely) or stop flying to visit people they love (even more unlikely). But what does seem at least semi-likely is the possibility that it could become more and more difficult to hire decent, reliable employees to be ushers, flight attendants, concessions workers, and gate agents if the experience of implementing the prices and policies of their employers became more and more unpleasant.

The hard part is that in order for that to happen, we may need more people to come “unhinged;” more incidents and confrontations that might cause good-hearted, hard-working folks to say, “I don’t like this. I quit.” Only then, it seems to me, might the bosses get the message and deign to treat their consumers with a bit more dignity.

But herein lies the ethical conundrum. I don’t want to be mean to ushers and gate agents. But neither do I want to be treated poorly by people to whom I’ve paid good money for a flight or concert.

Once, we were stranded in a tiny airport in Prescott, Arizona for almost 12 hours with our two young daughters. I’ll spare you the gory details, which are myriad, but they only delayed the flight by an hour or so at a time, so we were perpetually trapped at the gate. The gate agents kept saying, “Sorry folks, the weather in Denver’s taken another turn for the worse.” We could all see on our phones though that it was sunny and clear. Finally, after perhaps the sixth such announcement, I looked one gate agent right in the eye and said, “You know we can all see the weather in Denver, right?” He had no response, and I didn’t really expect one. It was a tense and unpleasant moment, but I’m not sure I was wrong to say this. I snapped at him, but I’m not sure I ‘came unhinged.’ I’m not the kind of person who relishes tense, unpleasant moments. I didn’t like calling out the gate agents, but I also didn’t like being bullshitted by them. My strong suspicion was that air traffic control was behind in Denver and in order to piss off the fewest people, they deprioritized our tiny plane of 30 or so passengers over and over. Which I kind of get, but it was the constant lying about the real reason for the delay that enraged me.

It’s not that I think I’m better than everyone else, that I should get to Denver ahead of people from Phoenix or Tampa or New York. It’s the way they treat all of us that makes my blood boil. It’s the deliberate choices that have been made by someone, somewhere, who will never see us, to treat people so disrespectfully, to put us in such a situation and then expect us to behave.

On my most recent flight, I was enjoying Gladiator, incredibly, for the first time. In the middle of the climactic battle between Maximus and Caesar, the film suddenly paused. A flight attendant's voice came over the speakers—and through my damn headset—to say, “Excuse us folks, but we wanted to tell you about a very special offer available right now when you sign up for our rewards credit card.”⁵

Perturbed, I soothed myself by imagining what might happen if the entire flight started loudly booing the pitch in unison. I was tempted to try and start the booing myself, but I knew my dear family sitting just across the aisle would be mortified. How sweet would it have been, though, if other passengers had joined in? If a chorus of boos had drowned out the announcement? Would the attendant go on to have the gall to come down the aisle with the application forms and the pens?

Perhaps the question boils down to this: Is it wrong for us as consumers to voice our dissatisfaction to employees who have no power to directly impact company policy?

We’ve heard the quote, “The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing.” And I can hear your eyes rolling as I apply that to such first-world pursuits as concert-going and air travel.

But here’s a fact: I started to write this post two weeks ago and then deleted it because I thought I was just being a giant baby. But then I saw a story about a woman who was denied boarding on a flight somewhere in Europe because her bag was a bit too big. I don’t know where the woman was headed or the context around the video, but she broke down in tears, falling to her knees, sobbing, and banging on a plexiglass barrier, begging the crew to allow her to board. Moved, the other passengers began to protest in support of the woman. Until finally, they were told that the whole flight would be cancelled unless they stopped complaining, boarded in an orderly fashion, and left this distraught stranger to deal with her distress privately. Having important business meetings or loved ones of their own to get to, they acquiesced.

I’m starting to think of this kind of thing as an illustration of what the Apostle Paul means when he says we are “slaves to sin.” It’s not just, or even primarily, our own personal bad habits and selfish choices; it’s the “way things are,” the injustices large and small by which we are afflicted and in which we are complicit simply by going about our day-to-day lives. These things we believe we have little to no choice about, because they are part of our jobs or because we have bills to pay and families to feed, but we know deep down are not OK.

Maybe the key is not to come 'unhinged,’ not to hurl abuse, or otherwise lose our shit, but to feel empowered to voice objection to what we find to be wrong or unfair in as polite and respectful but firm a manner as possible.

I had another situation arise in the days since I began this piece. We were visiting Boston and had time to kill before our flight home. We decided to visit the New England Aquarium, and I made a parking reservation via Spot Hero. I got a smoking deal on a valet nearby, but when I arrived there was a sign saying that parking was full. I pulled up anyway because I had made a reservation.

“We’re full,” the attendant barked at me. “Read the sign.”

“I saw it, but I have a reservation,” I responded.

“Yeah, well, we’re full,” he snapped back.

“But I already paid and everything.”

“You can cancel it. Sorry,” said the guy with no hint of actual sorriness, turning his back on me and stalking away, treating me like an asshole for expecting that a “reservation” meant that a spot would actually be reserved for me.

I took one deep breath, considered my words, and landed on, “That’s messed up.”

The guy was already walking away. But he certainly heard me. I didn’t come unhinged. But I lodged my objection, if not eloquently, firmly and succinctly (turns out to be hard to spin a thoughtful monologue toward a person skulking away from you right on the spot). And I’m not ashamed.

But while I managed to conduct myself with relative aplomb (certainly with more poise than I’d mustered at Red Rocks), my temper flared, and recognizing that, I do come back to some empathy for the ‘unhinged,’ because that is me in my less disciplined moments.

A friend of mine who worked at Disney World once told me about the time an irate mom summoned some kind of demonic strength and swung a jogging stroller at her head.

Surely, this woman had come unhinged. But the grace my friend extended to her—and the myriad guests who’d behaved similarly—struck me. “They’re not bad people,” she said, “they’re nice, normal people subjected to something they had never quite imagined.”

1. Colorado people like to act like they are so cool and easygoing, but they are just as uptight as anyone you’ll meet on the East Coast when it comes to their stupid, little blankets and spaces they’ve carved out for themselves to see their favorite bands without your big, inconvenient body getting in the way.

2. Also, bruh, I paid the same price as everyone else in the GA section and if I’m not interested in the opener, I shouldn’t have to get there in time to see them. As it is “General Admission,” I should be able to show up when I want and stand where I want. Involving “seats” in general admission at all is a dubious proposition, especially if you are going to sell more tickets than there are seats available.

3. An extra-sad element of all this to me is that the conditions they insist you accept put you into an adversarial relationship with your fellow consumers. We’re all a little mad about how much we just paid for a drink or a modest snack; about how crowded and hot and uncomfortable it is. We’ve each endured so much already that when we do find some precious space for ourselves, we defend it like hyenas.

4. For some context, I had injured myself earlier in the day playing pickleball, of all things. I lunged for a ball at full stride, lost my balance, and tumbled over. And while I managed not to bang any knees or elbows against the concrete, taking the brunt of the fall on my nice, fleshy hip, the impact jarred my lumbar in such a way that when I went to get up, it almost slipped out completely. Embarrassingly, I had to bow out of the remainder of the match and head home. And so the thing about Red Rocks is that it is a literal hike from the parking lots to the venue, with a significant elevation gain. Once in the venue, we had to climb even more of the famously steep stairs to get to the GA section, and at that point my back was screaming. I had just paid $39.00 for a can of Coors and a Pinot Grigio that came in a juice box. I shouldn’t have been so grouchy toward people, but perhaps with this context it makes a little more sense.

5. I still remember a conversation from a college course in which my professor made the case that it is unethical to advertise to a captive audience. With TV ads, he explained, you have the option to change the channel, hit the mute button, or go get a snack, but to play ads say in a theater before a film or on the jumbotron at a sporting event he felt was unethical because you don’t give the people the choice to listen or not listen to your pitch. You don’t get more captive than on an airplane, and I think about this lecture every single time I hear the rewards card pitch that seems to now be standard on every flight.