Video from United Airlines plane proves none of us are special
Apr 12, 2017, 8:50 AM | Updated: 9:11 am
To think that only last month the CEO of United Airlines was named communicator of the year. Now he’s best known for the word “re-accommodate,” which I would define as “forcible de-planing with extreme prejudice.”
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He has since apologized, but the Twitterverse is not quite ready to forgive.
United’s shares were down by over $1 billion for a while on Tuesday.
Even though, if you’re being objective about it, what happened was extremely rare. The New York Times says last year only about 40,000 people were bumped involuntarily out of 660 million total passengers. That’s six-thousandths of a percent.
And to think that not so long ago there was a time when no one would have believed this even happened! Have I told you young ‘uns about the pre-iPhone days – when people lived completely undocumented lives?
Yes! Back then all we had were eyewitness accounts. And I can safely say, the eyewitness accounts of this would have been laughed off as wild exaggerations.
They would have been dismissed the way all those stories of police knocking heads in certain neighborhoods were once dismissed.
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But now we see everything. We see what “re-accommodation” looks like. And this was ugly. And you know what else? This touched people who thought they were protected from official violence.
This video was telling a group of people who aren’t used to being jerked around that they were not special.
A lot of people as they watched it realized this could happen even to me!
A lot of people — as they watched it — they suddenly woke up black.
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