Showing posts with label air travel. Show all posts
Showing posts with label air travel. Show all posts
Sunday, April 18, 2010
The State Funeral Without the State
Polish President Lech Kaczynski and his wife Maria were buried today in Krakow, just over a week after the plane on which they were traveling went down in the fog in Russia. Usually, when a head of state dies, other world leaders, or at least their designees, attend the funeral. Not this time. Many leaders were unable to attend due to the difficulties with air travel in Europe caused by the recent eruption of Eyjafjallajokull, a volcano
in Iceland which has sent ash into the skies over the continent and halted air travel in countries to the north. Leaders of the United States, France and Germany were among those who canceled their plans to fly to Poland to pay tribute to the Kaczynskis.One of the feelings that people often report following a traumatic incident is a sense of disbelief that the world is continuing about its business when something so awful has happened. When you are feeling completely stopped in your tracks, it's easy to expect, on some level, that everyone else will be, too. This feeling is only stronger when an event has affected a lot of people, or even a whole country, as it has in this case. I remember distinctly the feeling that, after 9-11, it was fitting that there be no air travel. It wasn't just about security, it was that no one should move when the world had gone so crazy.
In that sense, you might think that the Icelandic volcano and its attendant flight disruptions would feel "right" to the people of Poland
. After their "stop the world" moment -- the death of so many government officials on one plane -- the world had to come, at least somewhat, to a stop. Something apocalyptic in their lives was paired with something apocalyptic in nature. It seems fitting.The problem is that when something big happens and we feel like the world should stop, we most commonly feel like the world should stop and pay attention to what has happened. This is what happened after 9-11, when in fact people weren't flying because of what had happened, and when the whole world did seem focuses, if only for a brief time, on what was happening to us in the United States. The week of the attacks, at the changing of the guard at Buckingham Palace in London, the band played "The Star Spangled Banner." It seemed to align. But that is not what happened this week. The natural world did something big, yes, but that something not only had nothing to do with Poland's tragedy, it actually prevented the rest of the world from focusing fully on Poland's mourning.
The fact of the matter is that the world does not stop turning when there is a critical incident. As much as it may pain us, most people keep on living their lives even when we feel like we can't. Friends may help and support us, but they cannot feel what we are feeling. And nature may seem to echo our anguish, but, in the end, a volcano can't empathize with us, either.
Note: In my lifetime, I think the most salient example of nature mirroring current events happened in October, 2004. For the first time in 86 years, the Boston Red Sox
won the World Series, and there was a lunar eclipse the same night.
Sunday, April 11, 2010
Poland's Tragedy
Ninety-seven people on a Polish government flight were killed in a plane crash in Russia yesterday. The group was on their way to a memorial service honoring some 22,000 Poles who were killed at Katyn by the Soviets in 1940. Thirty-seven government officials, including the President and First Lady, are among the dead.
Frequent Quarterbacker Edwin wrote yesterday with the following thought:
As I thought about it, I realized how crazy it was that the President of a country, all of the command of the armed forces, the head of the national bank and clergy, and members of parliament would all be on the same plane - a small plane going to a remote Russian village in foggy conditions. Clearly, there has to be something wrong with that. Isn't there?
I'm not sure I'm in a position to answer that question. Certainly it's not uncommon to have multiple members of a government on a single flight. We can all imagine that if Air Force One went down, it might kill more than jut the President. Edwin does have a point, however, that having so much governmental power on a single flight seems foolish. On the other hand, unlike the United States, Poland's President is the head of state but not the head of the government -- they have a prime minister -- so the loss to them is somewhat different than the death of a U.S. president would be to us.
When I was a young child, my parents sometimes traveled on vacation without us kids. While they were comfortable leaving us with a sitter, there was one rule. They never, ever traveled on the same plane. Even as a kid this freaked me out a little, because it represented my parent's contemplation of the possibility their plane would crash. As an adult, I realize that it also didn't make a lot of logical sense. If they were concerned about them both being affected by the same tragedy, leaving us with no parents, then they should not have been driving in the same car without us either.
There are certainly protocols that are publicly known for making sure that the entire U.S. government isn't wiped out all at once. If you watch the State of the Union Address on television, and you know your presidential succession, you may notice that one member of the President's cabinet is always absent. The entire line of succession never ever is in the same place at the same time, in case something happens to the whole group, to ensure continuity of the presidency. I don't know what the Polish equivalent is, but I would bet anything there is a reason that the Prime Minister was not on that plane.
It takes something quite counter-intuitive to produce a rule that says two important people can't be on a plane together. It takes overcoming the basic denial which enables us to not be afraid all the time to plan for the worst. Most civilians don't like to do that kind of planning -- that's why people who know they are extremely ill still don't make out wills or become organ donors. We don't like to admit that we might die, even though we know it's true. That's why, when it comes to security and continuity protocols, the people at risk are not the ones who make the rules. They have security and military people do it for them. The Poles may have a strong opinion about whether they did a decent job, given what has happened. Not being affected myself by the deaths of these government officials or the upheaval they may cause in Poland, I don't think I'm in a place to judge.
Thursday, April 8, 2010
Gallows Humor in the Qatari Diplomatic Corps
About 13 years ago, I attended the funeral of my great aunt Clara. She had lived a very long life and her friends and family turned out to honor her and to be with each other in a time of grief. Aunt Clara was active in her synagogue Sisterhood, and at the end of the service the Rabbi announced that the members of the Sisterhood -- a quite elderly bunch themselves, at least the ones who were in attendance at the funeral -- would show their respect by forming their "customary honor guard" in the aisle as the casket was removed from the sanctuary. As these little old ladies hobbled towards the aisle, my father leaned over and whispered in my ear, "Cross swords." Then, of course, we had a problem, because we were giggling at a very serious moment of a funeral.
My father will tell you that he is at his funniest at funerals. I was reminded of this because last night a man was taken into custody by Air Marshals on board a flight from Washington to Denver after he said he was trying to light his shoe on fire. F-16s were scrambled and escorted the plane to the ground. As it turns out, the passenger, a Qatari diplomat, was actually trying to sneak a cigarette in the airplane lavatory. When he was confronted, he said he was trying to light his shoe.
There are two interpretations of what happened. The one that surfaced first, and the one that reminded me of my father, was that the man was trying to make a joke out of what had happened. The other interpretation making the rounds this evening is that this wasn't an attempt at a joke, it was a sarcastic barb. In this version, the passenger wasn't saying, "Ha, ha, just trying to light my shoe! Hardy har har! Not smoking! No sirree!" as much as he was saying, "You people are so ridiculous singling me out for smoking. You probably think I was trying to set fire to my shoe, you morons."
I wasn't there, of course, so I can't tell you which interpretation is correct. Anyone who has seen the warning signs at American airport security checkpoints, however, knows that you simply don't joke about explosives or make reference to them in any way when you're talking to security or airport or airline personnel. So why did this man say something so incredibly foolish?
It's tempting to answer by saying he is stupid or arrogant, and I suppose either could be true. But there is a much more human explanation -- the same explanation as the one for why my father is such a laugh riot at funerals. It's not that either of them don't get it. It's that on an instinctive level, this seems like the best way to deal with it.
All of us have an idea in mind of how we think people "should" act under pressure. We also have an expectation for how we ourselves will act should we ever be in the midst of a serious crisis. The trouble is, those expectations are based on rational thought, and rational thought goes right out the window under pressure. It turns out there is no "right" way to act when threatened, or grieving, or in shock. It also turns out that people do pretty nutty things because they seem like the thing to do at the time.
My father thinks of his funniest comments at inappropriate times because they're inappropriate times, and he instinctively is fighting back against the seriousness and the sadness. This Qatari diplomat made a remark about lighting his shoe most likely because that was precisely what he thought the crew might be worried about (and he was probably right). Putting it out there -- in jest or in anger -- seemed on an instinctive level like the best way to deflect the situation. No, it probably was not the best idea, but he didn't have time to think of the best idea. In a moment of great seriousness, all he could think of to say was the cigarette-on-an-airplane equivalent of "Cross swords."
Tuesday, February 16, 2010
Fear of Flying
Hundreds if not thousands of times a day, we make decisions that are based on the presumption that the other people around us are not crazy, hostile or violent. From crossing the street in front of stopped traffic to sitting down in a crowded restaurant, we, by our actions, are testifying to our general faith that no one is randomly going to try to harm us.
There is perhaps no context where that faith is more evident than on a commercial airplane. We voluntarily confine ourselves to a small, crowded space, operated thousands of feet in the air by someone else, where if something goes wrong we really don't have a whole lot of recourse. There is no place to run, so the person sitting next to us had better be reasonably friendly, or at least not scary, or the next few hours are going to be awful.
Two stories in the news this week have attested to this very issue. The first concerned director Kevin Smith, who was removed from a Southwest Airlines flight after airline personnel decided he was too large to fit safely and comfortably into a coach seat. I have no idea whether Kevin Smith can actually fit into a coach seat (although I guarantee he can't fit comfortably -- no one fits comfortably into a coach airline seat), but this has brought into focus an airline policy that exists for two reasons. The first and more official is that packing people too tightly is a safety hazard in the event of an emergency. The second, less official, but very real one is that the person in the next seat over does not want their space infringed by a heavy passenger next to them. This is one of a number of policies designed by the airlines to try to prevent the person next to you from making your flight miserable. The controversy comes when that policy is enforced to benefit one person to the complete detriment of another.
There are situations, however, that are much more obvious, which brings us to the second news story this week. On Monday on an Air Canada flight, former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney asked the passenger sitting in front of his wife to raise his seat back. The other passenger responded by trying to hit Romney. He was subsequently removed from the flight, which hadn't yet taken off.
Most of us who fly have hopes about the people sitting near us. We hope they won't smell bad or talk too loud or, if we are on the aisle, have a weak bladder. We hope they won't have offensive political views which they share loudly or use lots of profanity in front of our children, and a lot of people hope they won't be extremely large.
Our expectations are different than our hopes. While we know we may get a seat mate of size, we absolutely expect that they will not respond to civil requests with violence. We expect it so clearly that we don't even know we expect it, because we never think about it until that expectation is violated. In the rare instance where someone is hostile enough to try to hurt someone for asking them to put up their seat, it has to be a little harder for the victim to get on the next plane. As they board, they are looking at their fellow passengers with a new and more distasteful eye, hoping that whoever they get stuck sitting with not only bathed this morning, but isn't out to get them. That doesn't make for a relaxing flight.
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Meet the Quarterback
- Naomi Zikmund-Fisher
- is a clinical social worker, former school Principal and a Crisis Consultant for schools and community organizations. You can learn more about her at www.SchoolCrisisConsultant.com
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