Airline chaos is coming to America. If only Democrats had less of a backbone | Dave Schilling

3 hours ago 8

In our modern age, the only thing worse than flying – cramped seats, bad food, someone potentially calling you a racial slur – is not flying at all. I will suffer all manner of indignity, up to and including a drunk puking up Jersey Mike’s on to my trousers, but if you dare say that I might not be able to board the Flying Nightmare Tube at the scheduled date and time, I will throw the kind of fit you only see in YouTube videos of people that are actually on airplanes.

This is why the United States Federal Aviation Administration potentially cancelling 10% of air traffic at 40 airports chills me to the bone. Whether I like it or not, I have to be in Pittsburgh this month. Would you keep me from enjoying the epic sights and sounds of Pittsburgh? Maybe so, if the alternative is a sleep-deprived air traffic controller suggesting my pilot take a nosedive into the Grand Tetons.

The reason for this calamity is as clear as the skies will be after 1,800 flights a day are grounded. The record-breaking government shutdown has led to vital air travel workers working without pay. Nothing like asking people to work for nothing, especially people categorized as “essential workers”. What is this, an internship in the movie business?

The transportation secretary, Sean Duffy, who first wowed us with his knowledge of transportation on MTV’s Real World/Road Rules Challenge: Battle of the Seasons, declared it necessary to take this path because someone (but definitely not his boss) has allowed the government to go unfunded for over a month. If only the Democrats had less of a backbone, we could all go back to the awful version of normal we were just starting to become resigned to.

I would not dare ask anyone in this political climate to do boring things like “govern” or “find consensus for the betterment of society as a whole”. I’m not a child, after all. What I would suggest is that, if one can find the money to pay ICE agents and the military, surely there must be a few billion lying around to pay the person who keeps planes from exploding.

But while you’re frantically refreshing your airline app, praying to an unforgiving deity to be granted the privilege of your seatmate removing their shoes inside a metal room with no open windows, try to look at it from the sunny side of the street for a moment. American Airlines suggested that disruptions would be minimal. Long-haul international flights, the airline said, would continue as scheduled. You can always find another flight, if you simply must go to Pittsburgh immediately.

This is likely to be only mildly annoying for most of us … unless, of course, it stretches into Thanksgiving week. You know, that period when significantly more people fly. More than 30 million people flew during the Thanksgiving holiday period last year. Sadly for the FAA and our political leaders in Washington, all of those people have families who love them and will want to see them again this year.

Since familial obligation and affection is probably not getting wiped out of human civilization in the near term and we can’t expect the government shutdown to end before that, the only other option is to do what we should have done five years ago: move back in with our parents.

I understand this might feel a bit outrageous to say out loud, considering our western society considers living with your parents to be “pathetic”, “embarrassing” or “a sign of a diseased mind”, but use some actual logic for once. The cost of living continues to rise. Wages are stagnant. Layoffs last month came in at the highest levels for October in 22 years. Work is scarce and low-paying. Employment is so hard to come by that air traffic controllers are currently working for free.

I couldn’t afford to buy a house unless DB Cooper appeared from behind a bush and handed me a briefcase of cash from the 1970s. Since that’s probably not going to happen, the next best choice is to live with my mom, who owns property, has passive income from her retirement, and has no problem running the air conditioner all day.

You see, if you live with your family, you never have to travel for the holidays. If you never have to travel for the holidays, you save on fossil fuel consumption, and alleviate congestion and understaffing at the airport. And we’ll never have to reopen the government, giving everyone on Capitol Hill more time to do absolutely nothing about our crumbling infrastructure. A mass movement to return to our childhood homes would save all of us from the punishing burden of having to try too hard – especially people in politics, perhaps our most labor-averse career path. The only people who love recess more than members of Congress are third-graders.

We can all go back to third grade, in a way, if we surrender to the bosom of the last vestiges of generational wealth in this country. Our parents worked the same job for 40 years so we could be laid off every two years. The only way this system we have built like an Ikea bookshelf missing an entire bag of screws can function is if we collectively read the room. We’re cooked. Artificial intelligence is going to make your remote copywriting job irrelevant in two years, so you might as well get ahead of it.

Hey, speaking of, maybe AI can manage the complex network of air travel? If I just thought of that, you can bet some billionaire moustache twirler considered it, too. I bet that terrifying eventuality will go smoothly.