#structural power

[therantingsocialscientist]

Ok, so not rebounding after the initial pandemic hit is bad. But… uh… anyone else see that the US has been lagging behind for decades??

[therantingsocialscientist]

Now, it is easy as a Canadian to be accused of being "anti-American" but I had an experience today that was really enlightening as to why Americans are (often) the loud and demanding way that they (often) are as tourists in other countries.

So I was at a small airport in Greenland this morning. Pretty much only Air Greenland flies in to this airport, the exception is that sometimes Iceland Air will send a Dash8 over from Reykjavik. Anyway, I had a thing to ask the service desk. There's just one desk, btw, it's tickets, baggage, customer service, etc. There are one to two people who will be working at this desk. This is the arctic after all. Airports here are REALLY chill.

While I was waiting for one of the two employees at the service desk to have time for me, this American lady pushed past the line and went up to the counter and started asking for someone. She was really agitated. Not long after she got to the counter she started shouting! She was shouting “I need someone to help me! Help me!! HELP ME! HELP ME RIGHT NOW!!” She was banging on the counter. She was panicking. It was… alarming. The nice air Greenland attendants looked shocked. In Greenland, you quietly wait your turn and someone will help you. One of the employees left the line she had been helping and went politely to help this woman. From as much as I could eavesdrop there was a problem with her flights and she needed her bag taken off of an Iceland Air flight RIGHT NOW or she couldn’t get her money back and she would be out HUNDREDS OF DOLLARS! She was shouting. She was shaking. She was PANICKING.

I looked at the board. There weren’t any flights for quite a while because Air Greenland's lone airbus had just come in from Copenhagen and that takes up the whole airport for a while before Air Greenland's fleet of seven Dash8s can start to load. I didn't see an Iceland Air flight on the board today. This didn’t seem like an emergency to me and it didn’t seem like it seemed like an emergency to the air Greenland staff but this woman was obviously in great distress. In her assessment, the stakes were obviously VERY high.

(My issue was that my bag was likely getting on one of those Dash8s and I was NOT getting on said Dash8 and I needed my bag to get off of the little plane and stay here where I am. Since the Air Greenland's one and only airbus had just come in, none of the little planes were going anywhere any time soon, and so I knew I had time to get someone to radio someone to get my bag).

The thing is, I've seen this level of total panic often before with Americans in airports abroad. I fly though Keflavik with fair regularity. Keflavik is Iceland's international airport and it is WAY beyond capacity and it is a total zoo. Every time I'm there I'm stuck in some looong line with some Americans who are freaking out because they think that nobody will look out for them and that if they miss a bus or there’s a long line for passport control that they’ll miss their flight and be out 1000s of dollars and nobody will look after them at all (because this is the reality in the USA), so their fear and anxiety levels are through the roof. And then they become the reputation of the loud, complaining, obnoxious, pushy American tourists that people are annoyed by. It's because they're afraid. In the US if you're in a long line and miss your flight it's your 'personal responsibility' and you're just fucked because capitalism cares not for you as a human.

The woman this morning had a very strong New York accent. I guess that this is what you have to do in New York to get the attention of an attendant. I guess she’s learned that she’s on her own and has to yell and shout and bang on the desk to get any assistance or nobody will help her.

I think I would have been more angry about her rudeness except she was so obviously panicking that it was hard not to pity her too. I was sure Air Greenland would get her sorted, so it was clear to me she didn’t need to be loud and yelling and banging on the counter and panicking. It’s sad that Americans have been shown their whole lives that it’s a cut throat world and that they need to look out for themselves with everything they’ve got because nobody else will, so then they get scared and pushy.

It makes me feel sorry for the Americans to not have that trust. I knew that, because the AirBus had just come in that no little planes were going anywhere any time soon. I knew this was the Arctic and people here won't let you freeze or starve or be shit out of luck at the airport or whatever. I knew that there was lots of time to get my bag off of a Dash8, should it erroneously be aboard one. Or that they’d bring it back tomorrow. Or whatever. The stakes were not high. They’d look after me.

The New York lady had no such level of trust. The opposite of anxiety is not calm. The opposite of anxiety is trust.

For me, it all wrapped up uneventfully. The service person kindly radioed the baggage people and my bag was just behind all the airbus bags, and I went and picked it up. I didn't have to wait for it, and I would have been OK if I had had to.

I wonder how the New York woman’s situation turned out. When I left she had asked the air Greenland person to talk to her travel agent on the phone…

and there was still no Iceland Air flight on the board for today...

[littlebirdsforyou]

What must be made clear is that this is not a crisis of individual choices. It is a systemic failure - within higher education and beyond. It is a crisis of managed expectations - expectations of what kind of job is "normal", what kind of treatment is to be tolerated, and what level of sacrifice is reasonable. When survival is touted as an aspiration, sacrifice becomes a virtue. But a hero is not a person who suffers. A suffering person is a person who suffers.

Surviving the post-employment economy

by: Sarah Kendzior