It's not my fault

Wouldn’t it be nice if you had a ready made excuse that you could whip out anytime something annoyed you? Something that would absolve you of all responsibility in any situation, your own personal “get out of jail free” card for life and its little hardships?

We have all known for years about the policy of most airlines to require that a person who is too large to occupy one seat to purchase a second seat.

Now along comes a lawsuit where the alleged victim claims she was informed she would need to purchase another seat not because she was over 300 pounds, but because she was…(drumroll please)…black, or maybe because she was a woman. I suppose whether it was because she was black or a woman depends on which will get her more money.

According to court records, she asked them, ““Did you ask me to purchase another ticket because I’m too fat to sit in the seat? Did you ask me to purchase another ticket because I’m a black woman?”

Ooh, ooh, I want to take a stab at answering that one.

Returning to my original point, this woman does not want to discuss the fact that she is seriously obese. She ignores the health warnings that are everywhere. She may be the size of two healthy people, but when the airline requests she pay extra money, she dips into the ready-made handbag of responsibility avoidance and whips out the old racist card. Just to make sure she has a better chance at hitting the lawsuit lottery (the goal of so many people in this society), she grabs the gender card while her chubby hand is in the bag as well. If only she had been left-handed and gay as well…

A similar case results in no lawsuit, just a wordy treatise on exactly why it’s not her fault. It’s everyone else’s fault if they don’t want to be intruded on by her size (and yet she spends part of the time complaining about others intruding on her space). It’s the airline’s fault for making planes so gosh darned small. It’s the fault of reproductive humans everywhere when babies cry, which again intrudes on her aural space. It’s the fault again of the airlines that she is singled out for such harassment, even though she mentions in passing that she has to obtain a seat-belt extender. It’s the fault of the seat for being too small that she can’t recline and get comfortable (“the seat back doesn’t support my back properly; the rounded edges dig in uncomfortably”). It’s the fault of the tray table that she can’t use it, and it’s also the fault of the bag of peanuts being tough to open and the cup of soda for being flimsy when she has trouble juggling them both because of having no tray.

She continues. It’s the fault of space, not her body, that there is not enough of it (the space that is). People who dare complain or feel put out by someone intruding into their space are fatophobic, or egotistical, or something like that. She actually enjoys the fact that her size will usually make people in a public setting, like a bus or movie theater, leave seats next to her empty.

The self admitted “fat lesbian separatist feminist” brings up the case of a pregnant woman who tried to use the HOV lane to support her case (again, I really don’t see the connection, but she tries anyway). She fails to mention that the attempt failed and the woman received a ticket for $367.

She then tries to sum up her experience, saying this could lead to a world where everyone is only concerned with themselves and not with others. She compares this policy with people who drive to the very end of the merge lane and then force people to let them in, and with people who won’t help you when your car breaks down, or with women who are “forced to put their kids in daycare and work at boring jobs for pathetic wages.”

Frankly, I see no correlation. Those people sound like they have more in common with her (I don’t care about others, only about my own self) than with the airlines.

She ends her lament with “This sounds okay to conservatives, libertarians and even some liberals--until they’re the ones in need.”

Amazing that she knows that all conservatives, all libertarians, and even some liberals are out to get her, and everyone else. I had no idea that my libertarian views that a smaller government is better, and personal responsibility is a good thing, would allow me to blow past all the cars in traffic. All these years I’ve been doing it backwards from my beliefs! I have got to read the manuals more closely.

The fat lesbian (her words) goes on, but I had lost interest and the words began swimming on the page. Was there no end to her blaming everyone else in the world for her problems?

Bad things happen to all of us. Just because you are a minority does not exclude you from having fate squash your day now and then.

Sometimes things do not happen to you because you are black, or gay, or a woman, or because everyone else is phobic and out to get you. Sometimes they happen because you are fat, and sometimes they happen because it was your turn to get rained on.