I’m on vacation this week, so this week’s newsletter will be much shorter than usual. Nevertheless, enjoy!
Not Quite Up in the Air
This past Thursday and Friday, I joined tens of thousands of other Americans in experiencing one of the worst travel debacles of my life.
In attempting to fly from my vacation spot back home briefly to conduct a funeral, I was stranded in the Charlotte-Douglas International Airport. While there are worse places to be stranded (as far as airports go), it was a sight to see.
According to the last reports I saw, approximately 15,000 flights were delayed or outright cancelled. While the purported cause was severe weather up and down the eastern seaboard, it turned out that other factors were at play, such as the hour restrictions imposed upon pilots and aircrews.
Of course, no one from the airlines communicated clearly, honestly, or in a timely manner with the thousands of displaced people. No one was told the extent of the problem. Few were told why they would miss their family funeral, wedding, crucial work meeting, or have the vacation they’d saved for years to take completely derailed.
To be sure, Christians have an obligation not to lose their wits in such situations. The ability to be patient in adverse circumstances, and especially with people performing their jobs (quite) imperfectly, are essential to preserving our witness. But one can’t help but join the thousands of other frustrated, road-weary travelers in asking, “What in the world is going on?” When paying elevated fees for poor service, the everyday person deserves some answers, not false promises.
But the normal tendency of people is to ask, “Who or what is to blame?” As with most situations, our plight was multi-factorial in origin. However, you guessed it: the federal government’s fingerprints were on our situation, direct or indirectly.
Determinations were being made about the safety of planes in the sky. Pilots and crews had already been told how long all of them could be on the clock regardless of how they actually felt. And of course, the billions in financial assistance doled out to airlines during the pandemic had been left to the discretion of the airlines to spend as they saw fit. Where were those investments positively felt by the thousands sleeping on airport floors?
I confess that there’s a lot more about the entirety of the travel situation that I simply don’t understand. But I know this: if people cannot trust the government agencies like the FAA and TSA to manage their travel experiences competently, then they will be completely unwilling to entrust other responsibilities to the federal government. So much for Build Back Better and a thousand other ill-fated bills!
Currently Reading:
Catch-up week
Quote of the Week:
Christians who see through the empty promises of the sexual revolution or question the definition of “progress” given by the Enlightenment may be surprised at the level and intensity of the pushback they receive from those who are secular, or increasingly, from religious people fervent in their newfound faith after converting to the sexual revolution’s ideology.
There’s a reason why hostility toward the traditional Christian perspective, especially in relation to sexual morality, is so strong. . . the eschatology of “progressives” depends on the success of their project. Anything that hinders their movement’s success or makes their project take a step backward, or anyone who is only partly in line with the new party orthodoxy jeopardizes the Story that has captured their imagination. (Trevin Wax)