We seem a lot angrier as a people these days – everyone on a hair trigger, sometimes literally. Back during more innocent times – let’s call them the nineties – we used to watch the Jerry Springer Show, with all its hold-my-earrings-fur-flying-windmill-slapping – as a guilty pleasure. Now, we’ve living the Jerry Springer Show.
Hardly a week seems to go by without news similar to that of the highchair-fight at the Golden Corral. Here’s one that broke out after a flight delay at the Miami International Airport. Here’s hundreds of kids brawling at a Tampa trampoline park. Here’s a chair-tossing fistfight that exploded at a Miami dog show. All these, mind you, coming just in the last two months.
It’d be tempting to chalk this up to News of the Weird, or News from Florida (same difference). But our anger is too pervasive to do that, now. Not for nothing did at least a dozen major American cities top their all-time homicide records in 2021. Just being a flight attendant these days is now considered a combat billet carrying the same risks as being a Ukrainian infantryman or a Capitol cop at a Stop the Steal rally. (Here’s a Southwest Airlines attendant getting two teeth punched out by another woman last year.)
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