If you look up from your phone in time
Thats refreshing, honestly, since they all don't but say they do under the sheer veil that is Public Relations. Hey, lets cut em some slack, though. When you're in the business of stuffing thousands of people into hundreds of 30-foot-wide, 300-feet-long cylinders that cut through the sky at 800mph while adhering to stringent time schedules, you've got much more to worry about than whether or not these people trust your company to do the right thing when conflict inevitably happens, right?
Actually yes...Support the tech, not the individual
Last week, United Airlines also sent a dog to Japan instead of Kansas. This dog, a 10-year-old German Shepperd, had to endure the 16 hour trans-pacific flight without food or water while also suffering from an ear infection. Its owner was ,undoubtedly, distraught upon hearing the news.
Just when Oscar Munoz, United Airlines' CEO, thought he was done shitting bricks, his ass puckered yet again when the same thing happened again LAST WEEK when a dog was sent to Missouri instead of Ohio last Thursday. Upon this realization, the flight was diverted and the passengers were compensated in undisclosed amounts.
Hell of a week
Basically, United Airlines PR Team can't catch a break. Whats even worse is that by diverting that last flight, they now were prioritizing ruiniting this dog with its owner over 33 passengers' schedules. I bet their compensation was substantial due to the lack of disclosure.
The kicker: none of this matters
We rely so heavily on the technology available to us that until there is a cheaper, faster, way to travel, we simply won't care about reports like these as reading the entire archive of horror stories attached to Air Travel wouldn't stop from booking a flight right after. The minute impact that these reports have on the offending company, and the underlying technology is a direct symptom of our addiction to said technology...and who can blame us? The same technology has made our lives drastically better than they were a century ago.
Sooooo?
United Airlines is just one of a myriad of companies that can ethically abuse us with no consequences. When companies can violate basic human and animal rights and suffer no repercussions because they provide the most technologically advanced service within an industry, we should step back and think about what that really means. It seems, with the turn of the century, that we have begun a paradigm shift that prioritizes technology over human life. We talk about how technology connects people that are far from each other but its wildly apparent that we're allowing ourselves to become more disconnected from the people that are right in front of us. So disconnected, in fact, that we let people drag other people off the flight we're on without intervening. The man had the right to deny their request for him to give up his seat to employees of a partnering airline....he bought that seat like everyone else did. In the event that they don't respect his refussal, which they should've, he even had the right to be able to atleast walk off the plane.....but no. These basic human rights were supposed to be protected by the dynamic of free market capitalism but that same dynamic has produced monopolies and lobbying that negates said rights.
In that first gif, people are quicker to grab their phones than they are to stop UA security or even get off the plane themselves...and honestly, I'm in the same boat. As we dive deeper into a world that allows us to distance ourselves from each other and reality through technology, we will reach a point where we have to conciously choose to not entertain the pleasures of new tech trends FOR the sake of human rights and human interaction. Until we get to that point, I'm just gonna put on my headphones so I can ignore the screams of the people around me being fucked by the system that provided me with headphones.