An Attitude Adjustment

by Julie Fonda

Over Christmastime, my fiancé and I flew to the State of Washington for a visit with his family.  When we returned home, though, I was worn out and travel weary.  You know the drill -- I needed another vacation to rest up from my vacation!  It was all too much fun, too much food, too much everything.  But, in this case, “too much” was good – just very tiring. 

I met the family that I am marrying into, ate the first fruitcake that I have actually liked and, all-in-all, it was a wonderful trip.  The only glitch was getting there and getting back home again. 

We had an unexpected three-hour delay at the airport in Las Vegas – my least favorite of the USA’s contiguous airports.  It’s always dirty and overcrowded.  This time there were no chairs to sit in as we waited for our connecting flight.  Would there be additional delays that would make us late for our Christmas celebration?  The prospects didn’t look very good.

The only seats available in our airport terminal were those at the slot machines, and – of course – both of the nickel machines were already in use.  So we rested our laurels in front of two quarter machines and slowly fed dollar bills into them. (Slot machines no longer take quarters.  You have to feed them bills.) We alternated playing the slots to ensure our seating arrangements.   

Crowds of tired, bewildered people stood in front of flight monitors waiting for their delays to be lifted.  My fiancé and I discovered (in the small print on the back of our itineraries) that our airline’s flights were delayed 50% of the time. 

After we ran out of cash, we sat in the airport’s Smoking Room breathing second-hand smoke for a couple of hours, listening to the sad stories of other weary, frustrated travelers within our earshot. 

One woman’s luggage had been inadvertently loaded onto the wrong plane.  So the airline had flown her to the destination of her luggage.  But it had been -- again -- mistakenly loaded onto another plane bound for, yet, another destination.  And after three such flights to three different cities (none being the destination printed on her ticket) the woman had decided to “donate” her luggage and its contents to the airline in order to reach her family by Christmas Day.   

Most flights were delayed, and connecting flights left without many of their ticketed passengers on board because those passengers’ initial flights had arrived at the airport after their connecting flights had already departed.   

On our return home, we were – again -- stranded in Las Vegas, necessitating a repeat of the slot-machine-and-Smoking-Room rituals. 

There were herds of lost souls staring off into oblivion as they passively stood in re-ticketing lines.  Periodically, one of them would erupt into loud protests and was escorted to another part of the terminal by airline employees who looked like experts trained in riot control.

It was not a pretty scene.

As I sat in the Smoking Room waiting for our delayed connecting flight, I felt miffed that so many people – my fiancé and me included – had been so grossly inconvenienced.  Our airline tickets hadn’t been cheap, and we should have been treated much better – in fact, catered to – for the price that we had shelled out to travel by plane.  The airline should have been more organized and planned ahead for potential delays.  The planes should have been cleaner, the airport food should have been cheaper, and the flight attendants shouldn’t have been so snippy.  After all, we were The Customer, and The Customer is always right.  I stewed in my righteous anger.

And then I had an incongruous thought.

What about the people who had lost loved ones and possessions and businesses in Sri Lanka and Indonesia and India?  And – worse yet – what about the people who had been swept out to sea?

“Oh,” I said to myself.  “I guess that I’m not that bad off after all.”

My self-centered thinking began to dissipate as I chastised myself for turning a vicissitude into a major event.

Later, while watching the evening news, I was saddened by one viewer’s comments about the tidal wave tragedy.  It made me feel embarrassed to be an American. It went something like this:

“Why is America always the caretaker of the rest of the world?  Don’t we have our own problems to worry about before we go helping people on the other side of the planet?”

My indignation revived itself.

What if the tidal wave had crashed down on one of America’s shores?  And what if that woman’s children had been lost in the flood?

Of course, not all Americans are blind-sighted to the world’s suffering.  But I wonder why any of us are.  Perhaps isolationism and global indifference are by-products of the American way of life.

And, yet, we wonder why we are abhorred by so many other countries.

I’m glad that I underwent my little attitude adjustment.  It brought perspective to my two days of travel frustration. Two days out of the eighteen-thousand- seven-hundred-and-twenty days that I have lived so far.

And if that’s all it took to remind me that we Americans are not the end-all-to-beat-all, then I consider it time well spent.

As to the other Americans who bury their heads in the sand – what will it take for them.