From the second I heard this story on the news, something clicked. This flight attendent tried to calm a dispute between two shrews over baggage in an overhead compartment in Pittsburgh. He gets hit in the head with someone’s luggage during the dispute. I can picture his blood pressure rising. They arrive in NYC and one of the shrews demands her checked luggage immediately and starts cursing him out. Can you picture yourself in this situation? If he knocks her lights out like he wants to, he losses his job and gets arrested for assault. Finally something snaps. He has his Howard Beale moment. He grabs the microphone, curses out the shrew, grabs a cold one, pulls the emergency exit lever, and slides to safety. Does anyone out there feel the same way about what is happening in this country? The movie Network came out in 1976. Does this dialogue apply today?:
Howard Beale: I don’t have to tell you things are bad. Everybody knows things are bad. It’s a depression. Everybody’s out of work or scared of losing their job. The dollar buys a nickel’s work, banks are going bust, shopkeepers keep a gun under the counter. Punks are running wild in the street and there’s nobody anywhere who seems to know what to do, and there’s no end to it. We know the air is unfit to breathe and our food is unfit to eat, and we sit watching our TV’s while some local newscaster tells us that today we had fifteen homicides and sixty-three violent crimes, as if that’s the way it’s supposed to be. We know things are bad – worse than bad. They’re crazy. It’s like everything everywhere is going crazy, so we don’t go out anymore. We sit in the house, and slowly the world we are living in is getting smaller, and all we say is, ‘Please, at least leave us alone in our living rooms. Let me have my toaster and my TV and my steel-belted radials and I won’t say anything. Just leave us alone.’ Well, I’m not gonna leave you alone. I want you to get mad! I don’t want you to protest. I don’t want you to riot – I don’t want you to write to your congressman because I wouldn’t know what to tell you to write. I don’t know what to do about the depression and the inflation and the Russians and the crime in the street. All I know is that first you’ve got to get mad.
Howard Beale: [shouting] You’ve got to say, ‘I’m a HUMAN BEING, Goddamnit! My life has VALUE!’ So I want you to get up now. I want all of you to get up out of your chairs. I want you to get up right now and go to the window. Open it, and stick your head out, and yell,
[shouting]
Howard Beale: ‘I’M AS MAD AS HELL, AND I’M NOT GOING TO TAKE THIS ANYMORE!’ I want you to get up right now, sit up, go to your windows, open them and stick your head out and yell – ‘I’m as mad as hell and I’m not going to take this anymore!’ Things have got to change. But first, you’ve gotta get mad!… You’ve got to say, ‘I’m as mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this anymore!’ Then we’ll figure out what to do about the depression and the inflation and the oil crisis. But first get up out of your chairs, open the window, stick your head out, and yell, and say it:
Howard Beale: [screaming at the top of his lungs] “I’M AS MAD AS HELL, AND I’M NOT GOING TO TAKE THIS ANYMORE!”
I don’t know about the rest of you, but I’m fed up. I’ve had with government manipulated economic figures. I’ve had it with propaganda and lies being spewed by politicians and the mainstream media day after day. I’ve had it with the government telling me what to do and how to do it. I’ve had with generals and neo-cons fear mongering us into wars all over the globe. I’ve had it with the imaginery War on Terror. I’ve had it with spreading democracy to countries that don’t want it. I don’t care about mosques two blocks from ground zero. I’ve had it with Fox News and MSNBC and CNBC and CNN and ABC and NBC and CBS. I’ve had with debates about gays in the military and gay marriage. I don’t care. I’ve had it with corrupt politicians, corporate lobbyists, Wall Street CEOs, the SEC, the FDIC, and every other government bureaucracy that doesn’t protect me or help me in any way. I’ve had it with oil spills caused by corporate greed. I’m tired of CEOs who can’t keep their dicks in their pants getting million severance packages. I’m sick and tired of seeing Wall Street big swinging dicks get billions in bonuses after destroying the lives of millions of hard working middle class Americans. I don’t want any more 2,600 page financial reform bills written by Wall Street. I don’t want anymore 2,300 page socialist national healthcare bills jammed down my throat. I’m tired of reality TV. If I see one more episode of Housewives of NJ, NY, OC, DC or Atlanta, I think I’ll kill myself. I’ve had enough of Snookie, LILO, JLO, Brangelina and Britney. If I hear about another new Apple iProduct that is going to change the world, my head is going to explode. LEAVE ME ALONE!!!! I just want to live my life in peace. I want to take a long walk on the farm road with my wife and watch the sunset over the corn fields. Is that too much to ask?
Our country is bankrupt. It is economically bankrupt and it is morally bankrupt. We are a train hurtling down the track at 80 mph and just around the bend is a stalled train. It’s as if the train engineer (Obama) has received a radio message that there is a stalled train around ther bend and his solution is to speed up the train to 100 mph. Can’t anyone see the disaster that awaits this country, just around the bend? The numbers don’t work. You can massage them and manipulate them and falsely report them, but they do not lie. Our path is unsustainable and I just want to scream at the top of my lungs that I’M NOT GOING TO TAKE IT ANYMORE!
DEPLOY THE SLIDE!
Flight attendant’s grand exit draws charges, fans
NEW YORK (AP) — No fed-up worker has ever said “I’ve had it” quite like Steven Slater.Prosecutors say the JetBlue flight attendant flipped out over a fight with an agitated traveler Monday, cursing over the intercom before grabbing some beer from the plane’s galley and making a grand exit down the emergency slide at Kennedy Airport. He has been charged with felonies but elevated to folk-hero status by thousands who shrugged off allegations that Slater endangered others and praised him for his take-this-job-and-shove-it moment.
