I don't like to travel. In fact, I don't like movement of any kind, really. I won't go on amusement park rides, water slides, or even a merry-go-round if I don’t have to. This is not a form of entertainment for me. It just leaves me feeling dizzy and sick.
I don’t find anything even mildly enticing about being launched up into the sky in an airtight tin can and breathing toxic recycled air while mutant germs and deadly parasites from every country in the world crawl over me unseen. There's no way I'm putting myself at that much risk just for the privilege of shaking hands with some crystal-meth addict in a Mickey Mouse costume at the Epcot Center.
Sometimes I get pressured by my wife to take her on a "real" vacation. I guess she bases vacation quality solely on the distance we are from our house and the amount of money wasted on travel accommodations. Summer after summer she is thoroughly disappointed as we visit such far away exotic locations as Hyannis, Burlington, and the majestic Lake Placid.
I’m not about to put my life in the hands of some anonymous drunkard who’s slumped behind the wheel in the plane’s cockpit. These professional airline pilots are paid minimum wage and have the credentials of a sanitation worker. Many suffer from unchecked acute mental disorders and are legally blind. They have no business hauling me and my loved ones twenty miles into the sky before sending us all into a spiraling, hellish death. No thank you, sir, I’ll take the stairs.
Things have only gotten worse in these troubling modern times. Back in the “good old days”, all one had to worry about was pilot error or mechanical failure. Now there’s the constant risk of finding yourself seated next to an Al-Qaeda operative with a shoe full of plastic explosives and a box cutter with your name on it. Is a chance to sit in the studio audience of “The Tonight Show” really worth the risk?
Maybe my fears are irrational. I suppose, statistically, the odds of my flight ending in a fiery calamity are rather low. But I’ve made such a big deal about it over the years that I’ve surely created a self-fulfilling prophecy. After all my refusals to fly, to board a plane now would surely guarantee that I, along with all the other innocent passengers who were unlucky enough to share my flight, would wind up as a pile of charred debris after taking a sudden nosedive into the side of a mountain in the Poconos.
I guess I won't get to see the Hawaiian Islands, the Eiffel Tower or the Roman Coliseum. So it goes. I'm a land animal, dammit, and if I can't get there on foot or by automobile I have no business being there in the first place. Flying through the sky is for the birds. Amen.
I don't fly either and I don't believe that planes are safer than cars (The Myth). Two things- 1. Survivability: You can survive a car crash (and hopefully maintain quality of life). And 2. Cars and planes are just too mechanically and operationally different and I believe that The Myth compares apples to oranges. What if you compared them against each other with respect to "time traveled"? Take a random victim who has died from either a plane or car crash. Now, with their whole life in consideration, add all the hours behind the wheel and compare that to all the hours spent on a plane. Which number is larger? I will guess that, regardless of how the victim died, he or she will have spent more time behind the wheel. That's what I believe anyway.
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Good points, Zed. I think the "planes are safer" statistic is just propaganda to get people up into the air. Maybe trains are the answer.
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