Brawl at the Airport

[Ad absurdum per aspera]

A familiar scene went viral on Twitter this week. A mob of people
brutally beating each other in the middle of an airport:

https://twitter.com/MattWalshBlog/status/1471531785917972486

I had difficulty figuring out where this occurred because there are
these sorts of skirmishes at airports every week now. When you google
"airport fight," as I did, the results won't help you narrow things
down much (but it will provide you with hours of entertainment).

Based purely on the exorbitant amount of time I spend in airports, I
originally guessed that this is Minneapolis or Chicago. Not to
stereotype, but I also assumed that these were Spirit or Allegiant
passengers. In fact, this is part of the traditional boarding process
for a Spirit flight. If you want to board in the first group, you have
to defeat the other passengers in hand to hand combat. The winners get
their choice of seat. The losers are stuffed in the cargo hold. But
upon further research I discovered that this mayhem did indeed happen a
couple weeks ago in Minneapolis, though it appears I unfairly impugned
the dignity of Spirit and Allegiant. These are, as it turns out,
Frontier customers. I picked the wrong budget airline. My apologies to
Spirit, whose passengers are much too classy to beat the snot out of
each other in the airport. They would at least wait until they're on
the plane.

But the main point here is that these people are stomping the living
hell out of one another in the middle of the terminal, right near a TSA
checkpoint, even using trash can lids and other objects as weapons, and
yet nobody is intervening. I can't walk five steps through an airport
without getting yelled at for not wearing a mask, and yet these folks
can stage a WWE match over by Gate 12 and at no point does anyone in
airport security so much as politely ask them to stop.

If I tried to sneak through security with my belt still on, or with a
pack of gum still in my pocket, I'd be tased, hogtied, and molested by
a man in rubber gloves. But these passengers can commit a series of
felony assaults against one another and there are no repercussions at
all. There were no arrests after this incident. No penalties of any
kind for anyone involved. White privilege takes some very strange
forms, you must admit.

Interestingly, we are told that systemic racism is so severe that black
individuals are murdered by police for the slightest infractions. And
yet you can watch a video like the one above, or so many videos like
it, and see violent crimes committed in the open, on camera, without
police even showing up to stop it, let alone spraying bullets
everywhere as the media claims would happen. There appears to be a
disconnect between narrative and reality.