N.J. man says he was almost kicked off plane after flight attendant found shirt offensive

[yardwork]

94. If you want to fly on a commercial airline, yes.

Paying your money to a for-profit airline in order to use their product means giving up a lot of personal freedoms. Or maybe you're sent by your employer on this trip as part of your job.

Flying on a commercial plane means experiencing the indignity of waiting in line to take off some of your clothes and have your body scanned or patted down by strangers, have your possessions gone through, possibly have your own property broken into and searched, etc. I can tell you from personal experience that as a woman it's not fun to "assume the position" spreadeagled in a plastic tube while federal employees look at your body in front of hundreds of people. It's not fun to have a personal item that matters to me removed from my luggage, angrily shown to me, and then thrown in a trash can in front of me. And that is if all goes well. Pity the people who are told to "follow me" by TSA agents. Wonder what happens to them, especially if they're immigrants.

And let me tell you if you're brown, like my wife, all this scrutiny is ramped up. She is always, always patted down. A 70 year old woman whose ancestors have been in this country for thousands of years.

Then you get to sit in a chair that is much too small for a grown human, tightly surrounded by other people who are sitting much too close to one another, in a tube with too little oxygen. Maybe some of those people are crying babies. Maybe some of them are panicking. Quite a few of them are drinking. Some of them brought strong smelling food with them. The one in front of you just reclined his seat into your lap. Forget it if you're claustrophobic. Say the serenity prayer over and over.

And then maybe you sit in that tiny space jammed with other people on the tarmac for hours. The bathroom toilets overflow and human sewage runs down the aisles. And the airline won't let you off. You are a mile from the gate and nobody - not even the pilot - knows when you can either take off into the air or return to the gate. Sometimes this lasts for hours. Google news reports.

But most of the time it's not "extreme" enough to make the news. Like the time I waited through delay after delay for ten hours to board a flight out of LGA only to have the flight cancelled at midnight. Options were to spend the night in the dark terminal or get a hotel room - which I did, no luggage of course, it was supposed to be a day trip up and back - only to return to the airport the next day to learn my flight was cancelled again. Finally got home 24 hours after I'd arrived at LGA for a 1.5 hour flight.

So yeah. There is nothing about flying on a commercial airplane that is dignified, that retains any constitutional rights as far as I can tell.

And somebody wants to enter this chaos wearing a shirt that says "bombing kids."

There is not one person on that flight who wants that kind of performance right then.

Oh hell no.