I’d like to consider myself an optimistic person. I not only love people, I have faith in them, which is a much less simple task. The word “love” is eager and almost flies out of your mouth with naive excitement as it’s said, but the word “faith,” rather, is carefully molded and, with shaky hands, is delivered to the listener like an egg on a spoon. To have faith in people is to have a miniature defense attorney in your head, and they are underpaid and work 70 hours a week.
“Faith” also happens to be one of the first words that pops into my head once the turbulence on my 3-hour flight to Boston transitions from the stage of turbulence that I call “off-roading Jeep turbulence” to “‘Do I take my phone off of airplane mode and text my mom that I love her, or would that make it worse?’ turbulence” (which of course precedes the final stage of “‘TIME TO PICK A RELIGION AND COMMIT WITHIN THE NEXT FIVE MINUTES’ turbulence”). Point is, it’s getting dicey, and now I’m trying to figure out if I’m the type of person who would try and save my fellow passengers if we crash, or if I’d save only myself. I never usually mind turbulence, because I have faith in the pilot of course. I just look out the window until it’s over, and I can go back to being so far above it all.
While my faith in the decades-old technology of the airplane is as iron-clad as the metal tube we all boarded, I cannot say the same about my faith in humanity once I walk through the sliding doors of the airport itself. Maybe it’s the somehow-metallic-tasting air or the fact that everyone has suddenly decided to walk at “lifetime-New-Yorker” speed (except, of course, the person walking directly in front of me, who is walking at approximately 2 miles per YEAR). Regardless of why, I become stressed. I become mildly enraged. I begin to lose faith as I wait in line, as we’re packed closely together.
Everywhere I turn is a caricature of a human being that makes me wonder if the airport is actually a simulation created by a scheming tech tycoon; It’s as if there the airport was given a bingo card filled with “types of people who objectively suck,” and the airport staff is trying to meet a company-wide bingo score quota. These people could fill a cast of an off-Broadway musical comedy with the pitch being “everyone’s a villain – that’s what makes it so modern!” They could fill a Guess-Who board where if one player were to ask the question “Does your person look like they treat waitstaff like human beings?” the entire board would be out with one quick swipe of the tiles. Each patron seems to have spun a wheel of “things that get on people’s nerves” and got a bachelor’s degree in doing just that. They are the type of people that remind you why reality TV is made. And, just like me, they are standing in the security line, trying to balance their ID, purse, and boarding pass in the same hand and trying to remember if this is the kind of airport where you need to take your laptop out of your bag. Just like me.
I would suggest air travel to folks like me – folks who love people and want to see everyone prosper and become better. Because as we stand in line, we are forced to see each other under fluorescent lights and LEDs instead of spotlights and binoculars. All of the kids whose faces are attached to iPads, all the white moms with blonde cornrows and red sunburns complaining about the poor service at their resort, all the bachelor parties daring each other to mess with the TSA agent, all the business people on business calls whose egos you can smell, all of them are inhaled through your lungs, and you are forced to suppress the cough.
Even though the worst of ourselves seem to be brought out and placed frantically on the security belt for everyone to see, the immediate next step is the x-ray. We exhale, empty our pockets, raise our arms above our head, and focus for one moment on anything but anyone else. We are all preparing to launch into the air, secured by friction and physics alone. We will adjust our never-comfortable seats while acknowledging that no matter how much filtering is done in the cabin, we all will breathe each others’ air for a few hours. The only difference in class appears in one curtain and a bit more leg room, and if someone’s baby cries, we all feel it.
I say I have faith in humanity, but its turbulence is heightened when I realize we all end up boarding the same flight. What looks so swift and smooth from the ground is actually quite the fight through the air, quite the tense, precarious balance. And with balance comes patience, something people like myself tend to forget about as we wait to board. Because we cannot just watch the world pass under us, as pretty as it might be. Everything is pretty if you’re far enough above it; You can have faith in anything if it’s through an air-tight window. Under the artificial pressure of an airplane cabin, I see a group of people just as excited to land as they were to take-off moments ago. There’s not enough time in-flight to find common ground over 30 rows – there never is, so I’ll recline my seat with my faith in my pocket as I focus on the descent. Soon, we’ll all be shaken a bit, likely uncomfortable and annoyed, but relieved nonetheless, because we all did, in fact, land.
