For 20 years I had to take at least�two flights a week to get to work. I still love flying and, although I understand the physics behind flight, I still can’t quite get my mind round how a huge lump of metal full of coughing people, screaming children, plastic chicken and cardboard bread rolls�can ever leave the ground.
But the other thing I find fascinating about flying is how we can be sitting watching a movie and worrying whether we can get the lazy, arrogant, foul-mouthed ladette BA stewardesses to bring us another G and T or glass of wine while we pass over countries 33,000 feet below us where people’s main occupation is thinking how they can kill each other. I wonder why the people on the ground don’t look up, see the plane above them, and think “duh, if we didn’t spend our time hating and murdering each other then we wouldn’t be living in a rotten, poverty-stricken, disease-ridden, stinking�cesspit of a country and we could live reasonable lives. Then we too could be worrying about things like whether we can get another G and T from the BA stewardess instead of worrying about whether we’re going to be alive in a week’s time”. Because, although it’s not politically-correct to say this, almost all the poverty�in the world is quite unnecessary. In most cases poverty is a result of stupidity, intolerance, corruption, incompetence, economic mismanagement and ignorance.
When I thought about writing this blog last week, I was going to single out countries in the Middle East, South America�and Africa as the worst examples for unnecessarily�imposing misery on their people when they could just as easily be quite prosperous. But now the pig-ignorant, intolerant Irish have started fighting each other yet again, it’s clear that crass stupidity and unnecessary impoverishment�is not limited to Third World countries.
So, next time I’m in a plane and�the lazy, arrogant, foul-mouthed ladette BA stewardess ignores my attempts to get another drink, I’ll still be wondering how a plane can actually fly and�why we can pass over countries 33,000 feet below us where people’s main occupation is thinking how they can kill each other.