This is late to the game in terms of commentary, but in all honesty, this story didn’t appeal to me until I saw this article reporting the (apparently) flamboyant flight attendant’s Howard Beale-like tirade and dramatic escape from his own personal customer service hell.
The photo within depicts Steven Slater and his boyfriend leaving a Bronx jail wearing shorts, T-shirts and smiles that exude a sense of calm. A calm derived from a transcendence from a societal flaw that demands something- anything- made to order and delivered with courtesy by someone who doesn’t expect a tip. That smile and that calm speak volumes.
Here’s where I get on my soapbox: American society is laden with entitlement. The new Manifest Destiny has nothing to do with the U.S. being “God’s nation” or the natural inheritance of all oppressed territories under the banner of liberty. It’s much more personal now. Today’s exceptionalism is the idea that, as an American, you are individually entitled to anything within your ambitions of achieving. It was the driving force behind the housing bubble- the well-established idea that just by being an employed citizen of this country, you are automatically obliged a two bedrooom house, a car and enough disposable income to take a vacation or two to Disneyworld every year. It doesn’t matter what you have to do to get there or how real that scenario is in the grand scheme of the current economy, it’s yours because your parents said it was, and because their parents said it was theirs.
But I digress.
The situation at hand is just a derivative of the very same ideology. We as Americans can displace ourselves from reality so easily that we forget that the nature of a civilization is that you have to build and share it with other humans. Had we been so snarky as cavepeople, we’d probably be lighting fires with flint rocks instead of following the Kardashians on Twitter.
Deep down, those of us who haven’t had empathy bred out of us entirely know this to be true. Steven Slater represents that deep-seated part of our brain that gives up our seat on the metro and throws money into the paper cups of the homeless as it screams out it’s disapproval over our culture’s inherent egotism. This lack of compassion for others in favor of accepting our societal flaws as reality is intolerable, and will prevent us from moving on to the next positive phase of human civilization as long as it exists. Politicians do not always have to lie. The wealthy do not always have to be in charge. And the customer is not always right.
Perhaps I’m wrong about all this- and that my presumption of Steven and his partner’s sense of zen is nothing more than a presumption. Perhaps they know of the immediate cash and fame that this ordeal will inevitably bring in at a time of so much economic strife. Perhaps it’s a sense of security, or even vanity, rather than defiance. Maybe I’m a romantic. Regardless of how Slater uses his 15 minutes, at this moment, that’s what he as a character means to me.
