Did anyone out there watch "The Happening" by M. Night Shyamalan? Anyone out there remember watching "The Happening" by M. Night Shyamalan? I'm pretty sure I did and I think the storyline went something like this.
By the way, I'd warn you that what I'm about to reveal could be considered a "spoiler" but if you haven't seen the film by now, you can pick one up used at Amazon.com for less than the price of a postage stamp. But the plot goes like this: the world's plants are pissed at us Humans and have had it with our constant mowing, harvesting, and just plain getting all emotional around them. As a means of self-defense they've finally learned how to emit a gas that makes people go crazy & indulge in self-destructive behaviors; which in this case means various methods of suicide.
Oddly enough, this seems to be eerily coming true today, but not with plants, with consumers. On a JetBlue flight, a passenger tries to retrieve her bag from at overhead compartment while the plane was still moving. An attendant asks the passenger to put the bag back in the compartment & return to her seat. The attendant gets verbally abused then clocked in the head by the overhead compartment door for his trouble. But when the attendant doesn't get an apology, he sort of goes crazy... overcome by this strange urge to self-destruct. He curses out the passenger, grabs a beer, pops open the emergency door and extends the inflatable slide & glides his way to the tarmac... and then into a jail cell with federal charges on his head.
The "oddly" does not stop there, however as public opinion seems to be siding with him. A large portion of the comments about this incident have been in support of the attendant's behavior. Which I find strange since most of them have presumably been passengers far more often than they've been attendants and should be more sympathetic to the plights of the passenger than those of the attendant. But they seem to be almost hypnotized by the attendant's self-destructive proclivities. They're even calling him a hero.
And the madness doesn't seem to be limited to the airline industry but has begun to spread to other businesses closer to home. I watched a video of a 25 year old woman punching a MacDonald's employee in the face because she was denied Chicken McNuggets. Apparently the woman was unaware that the juicy, tender chicken-like lumps of meat are not suitable for breakfast and therefore not available at the time she wanted them. Denied her fast-food choice, the customer goes berserk, jumps out of her car and assaults the drive-up window, breaking it with a beer bottle she pulled from her car (hmmm, think about that for a second). But the thing that surprises me the most is that the employee's response was to exhibit self-destructive behavior similar to that of the JetBlue flight attendant by approaching the crazed consumer essentially inviting more face punches.
Perhaps it is time for us all as consumers to reconsider our expectations despite the fact that beer was involved in BOTH incidents. When flying coach or business perhaps we shouldn't expect to be able to remove our bags from overhead compartments while the plane is still moving... or be allowed to smack the flight attendants around forcing them to grab a beer and incur federal felony charges. Perhaps we shouldn't expect MacDonald's to sell ALL the items on their menu at ALL hours of the day... or be allowed to smack the employees around with open containers of beer.
If there's any truth to Shaymalan's movie at all (and there really isn't), it would be this: we must stop this demanding & aggressive consumerist behavior before we drive ALL flight attendants, & fast-food employees mad and force them into self-destructive behaviors that will not only threaten their careers, but our ability to fly across the country, eating processed, breaded chicken chunks.
It's not too late. You can stop the madness. You can make a difference.
No comments:
Post a Comment