The Air Travel Manifesto

By Roommate #1, Aka. Married Muffin

Friends, the season is upon us.

Now is the start of spring breaks, Memorial day travel, friends-getting-married weekends, and summer vacations.

And now is the time: we must refuse to be controlled by the soul-sucking black hole that is air travel.

Now is the time -
we admit we were out of line yelling at the customer service rep about weather delays,
we concede we may have had one or two overly dramatic emotional breakdowns because our flight was delayed and/or cancelled,
we confess to leaving our cell phones turned on for a whole flight “on accident,” but knowing it was just out of spite,
we see that it may have been immature to slam our seat back against the knees of the twitchy person behind us,
and we know we were wrong to yell at the FAA employee who was just doing his job by taking away our 6 ounce lotion.

Now is the time for change.

True, the airport will always be a terrifying labyrinth. Is is unclean, dark, perhaps outright evil. You will feel that you will never get out. If you do, it certainly won’t be on time or with low blood pressure. There will always be long lines at the bathroom if you ever have a lavatory-type emergency. The coffee shops will not be open when you really need them. You will have to sit on the floor. You will not find an outlet to charge your various electronics. You will certainly never have enough leg room.

But still I say, now is the time for change!

We must not cry because our schedule is interrupted.

We must not act like the apocalypse will start if we are late.

We must be polite to the people around us in this black hole.

We must not use being stuck in airport as an excuse to pound an entire pizza and two Cinnabons.

We must limit the amount of Starbucks products we drink in one sitting.

We must not buy smutty magazines at twice the regular price (not that this author knows anything about that).

We must not spend over $400 at Brookstone.

We must not, in extreme cases of flight delay, ever EVER talk to news cameras, realizing that they will replay this footage every ten minutes, discussing the situation with such severe seriousness that you’d think the delayed travelers were war refugees, again and again, until the rest of the country wants to scream “It’s WINTER you idiots! Of COURSE there’s a snowstorm! Just like last year!” and then destroy their TVs with baseball bats.

We must not buy more than one in-flight adult beverage per two hours of flight.

We must not be mean to loud kids or mothers of loud kids on planes, even if they are all jerks (and I know, the ones on your particular flight were the worst of the worst).

We must not use our “reclining” airplane seat in attempts to injure others.

We must not knee or kick the person who reclines their seat too fast and thus bruises our knees.

We must not, when the plane lands, try to grab our many carry-ons and shove our way to the front of the plane.

We must remember that our cell phones have built-in microphones and we do not need to shout instructions to whoever is picking us up.

We must not stand at the baggage claim and b*^&** about the flight as though we just survived a harrowing battle with a monster.

This, friends, is the only way to keep our dignity and pride intact as we do our air travel.

And we must.

For ourselves.

For our fellow travelers.

And for all those before us who traveled by foot or horse or carriage, who would have given anything to cross the whole world in a day. Or, as the case may be for this manifesto author, to just sit in the LAX Starbucks for the sixth straight hour…..