Listen. I care about the environment. I do. I recycle. I shop with the reusable grocery bags. I’ve commuted by bike. I eat vegan food sometimes.
And if I suddenly came into obscene wealth, I’d like to think that I’d also make good decisions for the planet.
Except when it comes to one thing.
Flying.
Earlier this month, Taylor Swift was dragged to hell and back after it was reported that she has taken 170 trips on her private jet this year alone.
I understand the criticism in theory.
It is objectively Very Bad for the planet when millionaires and billionaires burn up tons of jet fuel just to transport themselves and a select handful of lackeys all over the world on a whim. And in the case of Kylie Jenner, this includes one private flight that reportedly lasted only 17 minutes.
However…
Let’s be honest with ourselves for just a moment.
If given the opportunity, I would ABSOLUTELY fly private each and every time – and so would you. Have you flown commercial?
Commercial air travel is a gauntlet perfectly designed to antagonize you and force you to suffer countless indignities in rapid succession. Walk into any airport and tell me you cannot immediately feel the collective vibrations of barely-contained rage simmering beneath the surface of the thousands of strangers you’ll encounter within the next 2 hours.
First and foremost, there’s the security checkpoint. One time, 21 years ago, a guy snuck a bomb onto a plane in his shoe and as a result, every person who flies has to take their shoes off at the airport. I don’t know how many airline shoe bombings have been thwarted as a direct result of this practice. (Meanwhile, we’ve had about 27 school shootings this year alone and no one will do one goddamn thing about that. Very cool threat assessment priorities, folks!)
Still, you need to make it to the other side of that checkpoint, so you play along with this pointless security theater. You take off your shoes to walk through the most disgusting and heavily-trafficked floor surface known to man.
(Side note: Yes, I have TSA Pre-check. Don’t write me to tell me about TSA Pre-check. I’m not just writing about me. I’m writing about the Shoe Removal Industrial Complex at large.)
Next, you remove the contents of your pockets and place them into a dog bowl to send them through an X-Ray machine. The contents of your pockets are usually some of the most important items in your life – your wallet, phone, passport, and ID. No biggie, just the 4 things that, if you lost them, would bring your life to a complete standstill. And it all immediately leaves your line of sight as it goes through the X-ray machine. Will it come out the other side? Who knows! The mystery is part of the fun.
Then you place your suitcase on the conveyer belt, followed by your personal item (for me, a backpack). Are you supposed to take your laptop out and run it through separately? No one ever knows. Not even God.
Your luggage goes through the X-ray machine, where some man in a uniform who isn’t quite a cop – but whose uniform *IS* disheveled – ogles the contents of your luggage, checking for toothpaste tubes that are too big. You see, you can bring a dozen 1-ounce toothpaste tubes. But you can’t bring one 7-ounce toothpaste tube. Because that might be… (checks notes)… terrorism? I guess?
Sometimes the Luggage Looker will have to reverse the conveyer belt and run your luggage through it again.
For a brief moment, when your bag does that little stutter-step reversal through the machine, you think to yourself, “Oh my god, what did he find? This is it – I’m going to be arrested and sent to Guantanamo Bay. What if he found a hydrogen bomb in my bag? Or a kilo of cocaine?!!”
Hydrogen bombs probably don’t even exist anymore. And you’ve never even seen cocaine. But none of that matters. You don’t know what could have happened to your bag between the conveyer belt and the X-ray machine. Someone could have planted contraband specifically in your Swiss Gear suitcase.
Finally, your suitcase comes back out of the machine, and you breathe a sigh of relief like you’ve gotten away with something, when really, you’ve just been reunited with your underwear.
All of your belongings shoot out to the end of the conveyer belt in rapid succession – far quicker than you can keep up with. You empty the dog bowl FIRST and place all of that stuff back into your pockets. You have to do that immediately because, again, those are your most valuable items, loosely strewn about and exposed for all to see. WHAT IF SOMEONE RUNS BY AND GRABS THEM??
It does not matter that you are surrounded by 500 law enforcement officials in the most policed area of any place ever. No. What if TODAY is the day someone decides to steal the contents of your dog bowl before you can place them back into your pocket?? Then you’ll regret not moving faster.
With your valuables in your pockets, you now hold your shoes and belt in one hand, while you try to wrestle your wheeled suitcase off the conveyer belt with your other free hand. No human has ever performed this maneuver gracefully and you give yourself tendonitis in the attempt.
There’s still your backpack to account for and, if you had your wits about you and weren’t so disoriented, you would spend the extra half-second it would take to place it on your shoulders properly. But you don’t have your wits about you – you are experiencing trauma and suddenly forget how a backpack goes.
You then shuffle away, shoeless and belt-less, searching for the closest bench, your pants slowly falling down little by little with every step you take.
Your backpack is haphazardly slung over one shoulder, barely hanging onto your body. Your wheeled suitcase never quite righted itself after you pulled it off the conveyer belt, and now it sways to-and-fro like a ship in stormy seas, clanging loudly as you stubbornly drag it across the floor. Every part of the suitcase seems to be making contact with the floor EXCEPT for the wheels.
Once you find the sweet oasis of a nearby bench, you attempt to regain your composure. You put your shoes back on, you put your belt back on. Out of the corner of your eye, you see others performing the same humiliating little ritual, but no one dares make eye contact. Like whores in an Old West brothel, we all feel used and ashamed, but powerless to demand better treatment for ourselves. Finally, you leave the bench, shoes tied and clothes back on, with whatever is left of your dignity.
You still have some time to kill before your flight, so you go to an airport bar and pay $15 for a 4-ounce glass of Chardonnay, served at room temperature in a stemless plastic cup. You are not even close to being buzzed, but ordering more refills would certainly ruin you financially, so you give up and move on to stake out a spot by your gate.
As your boarding time approaches, you feel your blood pressure rising. You know the REAL battle is about to begin.
Not all airlines are created equal and I’ll pause here to say that my airline of choice is the communist airline, Southwest. At Southwest, there are no “classes.” You don’t have an assigned seat. You buy a general admission ticket to board. That’s it. Whatever happens after that is your business.
You have a boarding order, sure. But how is your place in the boarding order determined? Well, 24 hours before your flight is scheduled to depart, you check into your flight. The earlier you check-in, the better your boarding position is. That’s it. It’s a TRUE MERITOCRACY.
YOU control your destiny at Southwest. And what if you want the airline to automatically check you in so that you’re guaranteed to get one of the first 15 spots in line? That “upgrade” will only cost you an additional $25. This is the sole indulgence my favorite communist airline allows and YES I do splurge on the Early Bird Check-In© every time.
When it comes time to board your Southwest flight, you find your number on the signs they have posted at every gate. The system is foolproof. It’s the same method used to corral small children going to recess. It makes sense. It’s efficient. It’s fair.
Once on the plane, you can sit in any seat not currently occupied by another body. This, folks, is what FREEDOM looks like 🇺🇸.
But I don’t always get to fly Southwest.
Recently, I had to fly for a work trip and had no choice but to use a traditional airline: Delta.
If boarding a Southwest flight is a communist utopia where all things are equal, boarding a Delta flight is a scene from the class warfare of late-stage capitalism run amok.
There is no numbered boarding order. Instead, you have a caste system, or “boarding groups.” And you have to be diligent to listen for your boarding group. And they don’t make it easy.
First up, they invite their Delta Premium Ultra Diamond Preferred members.
Second, they invite their Ultra Platinum Delta Gold Elite members.
Third, they board their Delta Visa Cardholder Plus Select members.
Then, they board their Delta Sky Plus Premier Select Premium Select Plus Select members.
Next, they board their Delta Extreme Code Red Baja Blast members.
Once they’ve concluded the Delta-branded groups, they invite First Class to board.
Then military, parents of small children, the pilots’ mistresses, etc.
Finally, after all of the VIPs are safely on the plane, they allow the unwashed masses to begin boarding in Economy.
Without a numbered boarding order, people don’t naturally form a line. Without rules, no one is inclined toward order and efficiency. It’s every man for himself. No one working the gate at Delta is evening pretending to introduce any sense of structure to the proceedings. Mob rule begins from this point forward.
They call to board Economy Group 1 and a swarm of ravenous Middle Class Laborers and Townies crowd the gate, jockeying for position to be first to pass through. It doesn’t pay to be polite. That won’t win you the promise of that precious, coveted overhead bin space.
The gate agent then says over the loudspeaker, repeatedly, “Folks, we ARE looking at a full flight today, and there won’t be enough overhead bin space so I WILL need to check some bags.”
The announcement introduces scarcity of resources to an already tense situation. People become even more desperate to claw their way onto the plane quickly. The gate agent may as well have said, “The Purge has begun. Murder is now legal.”
You look around at your once-rational fellow adults, whose ancient animal brains have fully taken over. We are now but wild hyenas angling for our turn to steal a bite of meat from a freshly-felled gazelle carcass.
On this latest Delta flight, I was in the second group of hyenas to board. A group of us had been huddled near the gate, very obviously waiting for our turn to be called, when out of nowhere, some entitled asshole woman came up from behind the group and beelined directly to the front, ahead of all of us.
My number 1 pet peeve is entitlement. And without rules and order, people’s sense of entitlement is out in full force, laid bare for the world to see. Boarding a Delta flight reveals one’s true character.
This woman gave us, her class equals, the Delta equivalent of a “go fuck yourselves.” She felt her time spent waiting was somehow more important than ours. That her comfort mattered above all else. That she was entitled to better access simply because she decided so.
And no, she wasn’t some late-arrival to First Class. Of course, I made sure to check now that I had made an enemy on the plane. She was sitting back in steerage with the rest of us Ellis Island immigrants.
She was simply an asshole. Some people are just assholes. And if you fly commercial, you have to encounter them. A LOT OF THEM.
And all these assholes are in the same metal tube as you, flying 30,000 feet in the sky. When we’re up there, all we have is each other. If an emergency were to hit, we would all be responsible for saving one other’s lives. These people? The same people I saw fighting for a chance at overhead bin space like raccoons fighting over the cheese on a discarded pizza box?
But even when the flight ends, the carnage doesn’t. Because the way we de-plane is perhaps even stupider than the way we board.
The plane lands. Wheels touch the ground. The plane arrives at the gate. The fasten-seatbelt sign goes off.
Suddenly, half the plane is standing up, waiting in the aisles, frantically collecting their luggage from the overhead bins. And then they just… wait. It’s the epitome of “hurry up and wait.” Like… where do you people think you’re going???
There’s only one exit! And it’s at the very front of the plane! This is a single-file line! The logic of this should be fairly straightforward!
In a perfect world, each row would stand up when it’s their turn. We’d remove our luggage from the overhead bins without a fuss and without catching elbows from the person in the row behind you trying to pull THEIR luggage, inexplicably, at the same time. And we would just deplane row by row in an efficient and orderly fashion.
But that’s not the world we live in.
Instead, we chose the path of MOST resistance. We want to make things HARDER, not easier. And of course, there will be those who feel ENTITLED to leave the plane before it’s their turn to leave, order and efficiency be damned.
I can still vividly remember once being in a row ahead of a man who was just itching to cut me off and leave before I had a chance to pull my luggage from the overhead bin. He took a step to get in front of me in the aisle but I shot up from my seat and planted myself firmly in his way. I played basketball so I know how to box out a motherfucker. I opened my overhead bin and took my luggage so that he would have to trail my ass off the plane.
And reader, let me tell you that doling out this tiny little shred of justice to this one entitled stranger provided me with a nearly SEXUAL THRILL.
I GET OFF on balancing the scales of justice. Maybe I have an ETHICS KINK?
If I could distill that feeling into a drug, I would be shooting up every night. I would be in rehab for addiction to that feeling.
But perhaps more to the point: I would rather not have to encounter situations that require the corrective action of my righteous anger at all. I would rather not have to throw elbows at the overhead bin. I would rather just avoid everybody involved in air travel.
So if I had the opportunity to fly private instead of commercial, there is no question that I would do so every chance I got. I can’t in good conscience wag my finger at Taylor Swift or Kylie Jenner or even the worst man in the world, Elon Musk, for this.
And I’d bet that if you were really honest with yourself, you’d agree. Next time you board a flight in Delta Economy Group 2, really think about whether or not you love the planet that much.