I don’t buy this. When the “husband” told the author that he needed to shut his mouth, he was attempting to enforce violence (attempting to control someone else’s expression or freedom of body), not to mention the wife’s doing this from the very beginning in trying to make our pigmented author “sit at the back of the bus”.
Yes, it was stupid for the author to imply a well deserved beating post-flight, but he was in no way changing this from a friendly discussion to a violent one. He simply one-upped it, escalated, and one could say won the war of words.
You fly an airline like southwest, you have to face the fact that you may get your little bubble encroached by other passengers due to the free seating arrangement. As an example, I got stuck between a very large man and a very large teenager (and I’m a fairly robust guy myself) on a completely booked flight to Az. We all could have been slow dancing the whole trip for all the physical contact we had, and I’m generally someone who doesn’t like to be touched. I could have gotten bitchy and uptight when I realized that that was the only seat left to me, and demanded that the flight crew address the issue. Instead, I sat my ass down, was entertained by the large man to my right the entire time (who was one of the most humorous guys ever), and shared some tasty non-airline snacks from the teen on my left. Bonus! By the end of the flight, it was like we were all old college buddies.
You can either be an asshole about it, or chill, and you may meet some really interesting/cool people (even if you do have your comfort zone encroached upon).
