The Internet is all abuzz today over "Clerks" director Kevin Smith getting kicked off a Southwest Airlines flight due to his size. (If you haven't heard about it, go ahead and Google it and then come back - I'll wait.) Smith then sent forth a lipase storm of Tweets from his Twitter account expressing his outrage.
As someone who's also struggling to get his weight down, I feel for him. On my recent flight to Salt Lake City (on Delta Airlines - good airline in my experience, by the way), the nagging worry was in the back of my mind the whole time that I might get that tap on my shoulder indicating I was too big for my seat and I would either have to (a) pay for an extra seat (not really feasible) or (b) take a later flight where the seat next to me was open (which wasn't actually conducive with the tight schedule I had to get to SLC). Fortunately, I worried for nothing; I was lucky enough to have the seat empty next to me on the plan ride over and lucky enough to sit next to people that weren't as big as me on the other flights. (And to my occasional seatmates - I tried to compress myself and even contort myself uncomfortably to give you as much room as I could.)
I am determined to get the weight off permanently so that this won't be a problem in the future, but for now I'm torn on who to support in this Kevin Smith issue. I understand why the airlines have to operate the way they do; on the other hand, there would be nothing more humiliating than getting the boot off an airplane due to your size. Do I think Smith needed to make as big of a deal as he has about it? Probably not.
The usual snarky comments of course populated the message boards and other electronic hang-outs regarding Smith's incident. And there is a point to their snipes (even if they are all jerky about it to varying degrees) - we of a larger size all do have to work on getting our weight down and being healthy. No argument there. Conversely, we still have to respect each other as human beings, no matter what our size, and sometimes you have to use air travel to get where you need to go. And I don't think those airline seats are even comfortable for the skinny people, let alone those of us who go on the other end of the bulbous bell curve.
Bottom line - if I'm not working to get my weight down, then you can complain all you want, but maybe we people of larger size need to start wearing "Scarlet D's" for "dieting" or "E"'s for "exercising" so that people know that we are at least trying.
What do you think, Rabbit Holers?
Alles in Wonderland A collection of sediments at the delta of my stream of consciousness.
I have a different take on it - the average person is getting larger and like it or not, the airlines and everyone else has to accommodate that. We could debate the merits of begin smaller (generally live longer, less type II diabetes, etc) or being bigger (tends to get sick from things like flu or cols less, tends to be unaffected by the cold, less likely to be physically picked on, etc) but if people are getting bigger, who are the airlines to arbitrarily set size standards for their passengers?
ReplyDeleteGood point, Jeff, but isn't what you're suggesting how we get to the society in "Wall-E"? :)
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