Have you ever been in a plane crash?
No. You haven’t. If you had, you’d be dead, and no one would ask you such a thing, because no one would care what you thought. Much as they didn’t when you were alive.
Plane crashes are not minor sorts of affairs. They’re quite dramatic. People get slammed into the ground, or the water, at hundreds of kilometres an hour, pulverising their bodies into nothing more than unpalatable meaty pulps. As they should be.
I’ve been flying, pretty regularly, for most of my life, and I’ve never died doing it. This leads me to suspect most of those who do bring it on themselves.
Of course, that’s quite immaterial. They’re going to die anyway, and should be told as much. When the stewardess gets up to give the safety briefing – and I would hope that it’s a woman, lest we castrate men into doing these sorts of emasculating jobs – she ought say “Right, in the event of an emergency, this is what’s going to happen: You’re going to die. All of you. Most of you quite unfulfilled, actually.”
These are realities, and yet much of society still wants to coddle us into thinking they aren’t. They’d rather us spend most of our miserable lives worrying about being dead than enjoying ourselves.
This is exactly what happened to me on a plane yesterday morning.
I was seated, ready for take-off, minding my own business, smoking my pipe, enjoying a glass of Bristol Cream Sherry, and reading a newspaper, for which I had booked the seat next to me. A wretched woman came up to me – part of the crew, probably a feminist – and she told me I was seated next to an exit door.
“What’s an exit door?” I asked. Apparently it’s a naive contraption that gets used in the event of an emergency, and she wanted me to stop reading so I could learn how to use it.
“What? That’s a door?” I scoffed. “That bloody thing?”
“Yes,” she said, probably realising at this point that she’d made a fool of herself.
“Sod off,” I told her. This was the only reasonable response. You’ve got to be careful never to trust these people, these women.
She came back about five minutes later and asked if I could move to a different seat, but I had no intention to. The seat I had was next to the one my paper was sitting in, I’d paid for it especially for that purpose, and if I were to move, where was my paper going to go? I told her no.
She was quite angry, this woman. I could tell she was quite sensitive, because she’d already been upset with me for not wearing my seatbelt – what’s that flimsy little thing going to do at 800km/h? – and for earlier telling a cripple passenger to kill himself.
I didn’t see this woman again, but I did shortly see the pilot, who quite brazenly asked me to leave his aircraft. We got into a fairly spirited discussion at which point I punched him in the face, and of course, everybody overreacted, as they’ve been accustomed to do these days.
I was escorted from the plane by two men, who, as I discovered at the time, were commendably strong.
When they took me off, everybody cheered and clapped, which, of course, the media is making a big song and dance about. This is what happens when you report something without context; I’ve found people always do that when I get off a plane.
This is undoubtedly going to be a public relations disaster for Air New Zealand, who are only vindicating the Government’s decision to sell them half off. Nobody wants to fly an airline that expects its passengers to engage in unpaid labour learning to operate a door that will never need using anyway.
Let’s assume I had the patience to put up with this nonsense and the time to let this woman prattle on about this or that. I would have forgotten it 20 minutes into the flight anyway.
I’m 75. How can they expect me to remember all of that? I don’t remember my last wife.
But this is the pathology of the nanny state. They want us all to waste our time preparing for things that will never eventuate, or probably don’t even exist. Next they’ll be asking us not smack our kids over the head a few times if they get out of line, or to drive at speeds less than our cars can actually go.
These same people who think I should be operating exit doors, wearing my seatbelt, and not putting out my cigar on the seat next to me are probably the same people who think the safety instruction cards are in any way realistic.
We get depictions of planes that have crashed in the ocean, and everybody’s smiling, calmly putting on their life jackets and oxygen masks. What they don’t show you is that they’re actually screaming, one guy’s head is on fire, and half of them have lost at least one of their limbs. The people who do make it out of the plane will drown.
What we ought do is take every person who thinks exit doors are important, put them on their own planes, and fly them straight into the side of Mount Tongariro. See how much those doors help them then.