I Don’t Care If a Flight Attendant Almost Hit a Baby

Yes and no... we might reach an equilibrium where the level of customer service just increases. Visit Japan and then come back to the USA- American companies treat their customers like cattle (or cow pies).

Cached version - https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:NnG-aS...

The reason these videos appeal to people is because it returns some power back to the customer being mistreated.

Any fairly frequent flier will have horror stories of being mistreated by airline or border personnel, and most times the only thing you can do is to put up with it. But NOW, after the United incident, it feels like the customer is no longer as helpless as before and can no longer be mistreated with impunity. This is irrespective of validity of any of the viral videos being circulated.

I don't like the five minutes of hate either. And the over abundance of out-of-context filming going on everywhere.

But I do care that a woman was hit by a stroller and that a baby was almost hit. Mr. Flight Attendant is an employee, not police officer, and has no right to assault anyone.

What upsets me, and everyone else if they spent a minute to think about it, is that flying (among many other things we do) has become a throughly unpleasant.

Flight crews are increadily underpaid, over worked and under extreme stress. If they don't close that gate on time they'll miss departure, have to wait in cue several minutes and cost their company thousands in fuel.

So they're stressed, annoyed, view us a cattle (which we are) and will lay their hands on woman with babies.

It's not the flight attendants fault. It's American Airlines' fault.

"I'm sure there is a perfectly valid and rational explananation for why this woman was hit with her own stroller and then a child was physically threatened."

Oh. Okay. Yeah. I bet she was asking for this treatment. Just look at how she was dressed, right? Right!?

While it is cough unfortunate that now you have to see a clearer and less imperfect window into fellow human experience and feel those damnable pangs of empathy ever now and then, this is inevitable.

There are 2 kinds of global surveillance. There is the kind kicked off by the government to quasi-legally spy on anyone at any time for "national security". There is also the kind that is bottom up, the population sharing it's perspectives with itself.

The later has been increasingly influential. It has shown us police brutality. It has debunked ideas that women at the Berkeley riot was armed (and shown Reuters doesn't vet photos very well). It has shown us black citizens trying to stop white antifa activists from starting a riot in their neighborhood. It's shown us Nazis being punched. It reminds us of the lies and about-faces of politicians. It has shown us the poor driving skills of our peers. And that's this month alone.

And on and on.

For all it's flaws, this surveillance led by individuals (who recognize they own their own perspective and have a right to share it) is changing society far more than anything else we've seen in recent memory and it is accelerating.

It's a good thing, on balance

I really don't understand why people get upset about this type of news, engaging with it is completely voluntary. I read the news every morning and I had no idea this was even an event.

tl;dr: Stop reacting to videos of humans not being at their finest.

Well, yes and no. Yes overreacting with outrage to situations where we don't always have the full details is fraught with pitfalls.

At the same time, perhaps we can as a society use these moments, not for outrage but to make us better at being human. Recognize that in the grand scheme of things, we are all humans and in the same boat, and that it is better for us to suffer a LITTLE injustice instead of escalating to A LOT of injustice for someone else (aka. revenge).

Fun note: the old Moses law of "an eye for an eye" was meant in the context of not retaliating with greater force than the original injustice, precisely to avoid conflict escalation.

This got flagged? Why? How can one vote to unflag? [Edit: seems to be unflagged now]

While he has a point, the way that the flight attendant reacted when the man wanted his name by wanting to fight was uncalled for. This is a big indication to me that again they handled this situation poorly and the man that supposedly hit the woman and almost her child, was probably not in a good state of mind. If you hurt or injure someone as a person working in the service industry, your first reaction should not be wanting to fight someone that is being abrasive while trying to help.

I too am tired of the Five Minutes Hate. Seems like every day there's another person, company, entity the news says I'm supposed to dread and boycott. United, American Airlines, Uber, Macys, Chick-fil-a, the list goes on.

Hell yeah! Way to stick it to Big Consumer!

I hate my job, but I thank God that I'm not a flight attendant.

What's the point of this post? And why is this on front page?

P.S.: Wow! that was the fastest downvote ever (1 minute!). Waiting for the comment including the reasoning...

Edit: I see some users mentioning this story has been flagged. Just so you don't get more angry at me, I haven't flagged this (or anything ever), nor I'm sure I could if I wanted to. I have questions and would like to read answers about it, I'm not up for shutting down the discussion.