Being Rude
Modern life is all about managing through an 8 billion person world. It can be misleading as we travel around from here to there. Whether in the West or the East, the North or the South, there are great swaths of wide open spaces. I watched a movie the other day called Survive. It was about a woman who is suicidal who survives a plane crash and then has to find her way off of a remote mountaintop, fighting against the elements, including a wolf attack. The harshness of the environment is contrasted against the harshness of her own sense of self-destruction, with the two external forces working against one another to cancel out each other to the benefit of the woman’s survival. It was a well-crafted story and surely these forces of nature do very much exist, but there was something missing. To begin with, this is an attractive, healthy woman who seems to have a very nice life available to her if only she can get out of her own head. Then, as we eventually learn, this plane crash does not happen in the remote wilds of northern Canada or even Alaska, it happens in Montana and was a commercial airline flight from Oregon back to the eastern United States. Now, I am sure there are some remote areas of Montana, but this is not Patagonia or deepest, darkest Africa that is off the grid. The FAA knows exactly where that plane was at every second. The Air National Guard or National Interagency Fire Center that monitors wildfires could mobilize a rescue mission in minutes out of Bozeman or Kalispell. The real issue in that part of the country is not about remote search and rescue, it’s about too many people moving into that wilderness and an inability to develop sufficient affordable housing to accommodate the expanding world and where it wants to live.
We are hearing every day about China’s rapidly failing economy, as highlighted by the growing real estate glut. That’s right, whole cities’ worth of high rise buildings are going unused and empty because of overbuilding, apparently because they are in places where people either don’t want to live or can’t afford to live. How crazy is that? We are talking about a country that has 1.4 billion people, albeit being eclipsed this summer by India as the most populous country in the world. I’m sure the macroeconomic data for China would show that there is net demand for housing at the same time as there is excess supply of new built homes. That’s not unlike seeing data in the U.S. that while unemployment is 3.8% and yet there are more jobs by something like 1.6X than there are people who are unemployed. Naturally, that’s all about economic displacement, but still it is an ironic situation that is a relatively new phenomenon. The world is getting more and more complicated to be sure, but the biggest issue is not too much housing, too many unfilled jobs or too much wilderness. Let’s cut through all the flack and recognize that the problem the world faces is too damn many people that are all living longer and longer in less and less space with less and less available resources. And as much as Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos want and expect to colonize Mars, that’s a chapter that’s still a long ways off. Until we learn how to properly distribute what we have, getting more to distribute is not really the best answer.
There is also another side effect of all of this that I am feeling this weekend in the cute little village of Beacon, New York in the bucolic Hudson Valley north of New York City. This place is just north of Sleepy Hollow, made famous by Washington Irving and a place near where Rip Van Winkle slept away 20 years under a tree, just to escape his nagging wife, Dame Van Winkle. This is supposed to be a kinder, gentler part of the world, just like Bozeman is supposed to be all about the wide open spaces. And then there’s Yellowstone, right? In other words, the world finds its way to these places and then the fun and games begin.
The impact of all of this is far ranging, but I go back to my primary concern, the sheer number of us mostly chasing around trying to do the same things. Have you noticed that all the cruise ship lines are loading up their roster and their fleets to take the teeming masses down to visit Patagonia and Antarctica? A few years ago, my wife Kim mentioned to my youngest son, Thomas, back when he was perhaps 17 years old, that she wanted to visit China. His comment, at that ripe old age, was, “you haven’t been to China?!” Thomas had been to China twice by then. Everyone with means wants to go everywhere. Kim and I are lucky, we’ve lived lives that have included an abundance of global travel…perhaps enough by now. We are going to Southeast Asia in February, but after that, we may hang up our global travel spurs. They say it’s one of the best things you can do for the environment. That, and plant a wildflower garden, which I’ve already done.
One of the side effects of all this overcrowding, and especially all of this trying to all go to the same “nice” places, is that we have interactions with others in tight quarters that can be less than polite. In fact, what has brought this to mind is some kerfuffles I have had lately. I wish I could claim that this is about what has been done to me, but the truth is that I have been as much of the problem as a victim of the problem. Kim has pointed that out to me and she wonders if I have simply shortened my fuse or if I have become less tolerant, as often happens as part of aging. I like to think of myself as a non-elitist who cares about my fellow man. But as the old joke all too correctly characterizes, all too often I show my love for humanity and yet hate the people crowding in around me.
On the Jet Blue flight to JFK, Kim and I were flying what Jet Blue calls their Mint service. No one likes First Class, but who can dislike mint? These are bigger, lie-flat seats in the front of the plane with nice big tv screens, a nice meal menu and extra-attentive service, for which one pays a hefty multiple of an economy seat and service. These are only available on longer, mostly transcontinental or overseas flights. We are regular users of the service and have what Jet Blue calls Mosaic frequent flyer status. I have no real ethical problem using this service since it’s available to anyone who is willing to pay the price. As such, as exclusive as it might seem, it really isn’t exclusive at all, just pricey. Mint service includes nice noise-canceling headphones….usually. But this time the attendants said they only had 8 headsets for 16 Mint passengers. Due to a set of circumstances, my immediate request for a set (I had no awareness of the shortage) went unmet and when they finally got to me again they were out and had only regular earbuds. I was not happy. I felt I should have been at the head of that line, but they saw things differently. If my tv is broken on a flight, I’m not happy, but I know it’s not the attendant”s fault. This seemed more like an attendant issue. It didn’t help that they were both of ethnic origin and spoke with less crispness than the King’s English. To be blunt, I lost my temper and made a fuss. Now I did go up to the galley mid-flight and offer a true and unhedged apology, which was graciously accepted. And when disembarking, I did find in the overhead compartment the other bag of headsets that they claimed was not onboard. But none of that matters. I was rude and they were rude back and none of us should have gone there. Life is too short and we are too overcrowded on this planet for anything but civility. I will work to do better, because that’s all I can control.