Thursday, November 26, 2009

in spite of the name of this blog.....

sometimes good things happen. I guess since it was Thanksgiving yesterday, this is as good a time as any to post a more upbeat post. I am, believe it or not, an optimist. I'm just a hard-nosed one. This quote from Oscar Wilde sums up my outlook fairly well: "We are all laying in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars." It seems too many people take pleasure in the shortcomings and failures of their fellow man and use man's many failures to validate their own failure to try and make the world better. People see people's failures but not their successes? Why is that? Sure people screw up, but they also do things right, and well. Why can't people focus on those things rather than the negative? .

Anyway, I was at the airport the other day, flying back to the States for Thanksgiving and we had a starter problem on one of the engines, discovered only when we were taxiing down the runway to take off. So while the captain learned of this problem, we of course sat there helplessly, in the plane, for about an hour and a half or maybe even two, until they learned that the replacement part would have to be shipped from Japan. Finally we were told that because this part wouldn't be arriving any time soon that we'd have to go back into the airport. So back everyone trooped, having to return THROUGH customs because we had cleared once. It was a long, winding trip back to the terminal and at one point we had to descend an escalator to wait in a small area in front of an automatic double doors so that we could take a shuttle back. So as people came down the escalator, they naturally didn't move particularly quickly forward, away from the escalator. People would move a little ways and then stand there, because...well, why bother? However, it became apparent that if we didn't all move a decent ways forward from the bottom of the escalator after coming down it, that people coming down it would bump into the people who'd just come down and there could potentially be a bit of a build-up of people. Some people noticed this fairly early and said quite clearly and forcefully that people should move forward. There were probably 150 or so people waiting in an area around 20' by 30' and so it was imperative that people did move once they got down the escalator. Once folks got down to the bottom, we had to stand around for about 15 minutes, having sat on the plane for a couple of hours with no water, many folks having connections put in jeopardy or having missed them altogether.

However, there at the bottom of the escalator, folks stood around, joked, people were polite to one another, no one pushed or dissed anyone, and everyone was a good human, just waiting for our shuttle bus to take us back to the terminal so that we could make new reservations for our flights to wherever we were going. And there were people of every race-black, white, Asian, Latino. It ain't much, but it's something.

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