I Shouldn't Even Have To Say This: Close The Window Shade on Your Next Flight

It’s time we have an honest conversation about it.

Leonardo DiCaprio in The Wolf of Wall Street. Photo: Screenshot.

It’s a wonder that more people don’t crash out at airports. It is traumatic to fly almost everywhere. Not the anxiety of gears shifting and engines whirring, the rational fear of being launched into thin air, above the clouds, where later different gears will shift and engines whir in a different direction, and you land someplace else. I mean the disrespect of the rest of it. That backpack needs to be all the way under the seat in front of you. Well, it’s basically under the seat in front of me. You’ll have to gate check that suitcase, we’re out of overhead space. Says who? Who do you think you are? Sauntering through security with a belt and a pacemaker? God forbid you forget about a water bottle, or try to tap a screen that’s taking your picture, or tap a screen that needs to be scrolled. The airport is a place where dogma and puritanism rule. What a relative calls “doorman’s mentality,” where people with the least amount of power wield it randomly and haphazardly, runs amok here. Police departments almost exclusively recruit from a pool of the pettiest and simplistic people you went to high school with; airports recruit from the second-pettiest. There is a particular personality trait to people who work at TSA, a character whose delight comes from being difficult.

I don’t want to have a child until I can fly private. “I know,” my friend’s partner said to me at the Delta terminal at LAX last month. “You’ve actually said that like three times this week.”