Big Business lives by rules that don’t apply to Little People. Experts will tell us that United was within its rights to ask a passenger on board to disembark, even when he posed no threat to security. Passengers have been asked to get off planes for speaking Arabic, and however revolting such evictions may be, they are grounded in some perception — however simplistic, however “profile”-oriented — of a risk to a plane’s security.
I say this not to condone evictions on linguistic grounds, but to make a philosophical distinction between those evictions and the one that occurred on the United flight, where a man who posed no threat — not even in the overheated imaginations of his fellow passengers or the flight crew — was dragged off a flight simply to accommodate employees.
Compounding this act of astonishing corporate selfishness were the aesthetic dimensions of the episode: pictures of a man being pulled violently down the aisle, evoking images of righteous civil disobedience at so many moments in American history. The man’s fellow passengers can be heard voicing their alarm and their disgust, their indignation at the bullying, the intimidation — the downright oppression — of a helpless doctor who wanted to do nothing more than travel on the flight he’d paid for.
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