General had the air marshal’s gun. And I have no idea why he took to calling himself General, but he did. His name’s not what’s important. What mattered is he had the gun. Which meant from that moment on, he was the one calling all the shots.
I’ll go back to that first minute or two. It’s hard to describe the absolute chaos in the cabin. Like you could literally feel the fear and confusion in the air. I think that’s what he was counting on. Because seriously. Let’s do the math. One gun. How many bullets could that be, right? I mean, it wasn’t like it was this big automatic assault rifle or anything. It was just your ordinary, run of the mill pistol. What’s that, like six bullets? And how many of us passengers? Several hundred, right? It’s not like he could have killed us all.
But what do you do when someone starts yelling and calling himself General and waving a gun around in a crowded airplane cabin? You freeze up, you turn off your brain except the one tiny fraction of it that’s necessary for your survival, and you do whatever he tells you to do.
Which is exactly what we did.
General ordered us to get out our phones. He wanted us recording everything he had to say, his big manifesto. And maybe it doesn’t come as a surprise to you after my tirade a little bit earlier, but General was a dad concerned about his children’s safety.
We’re back to Michigan and environmental justice. I’m telling you it’s a real thing. If someone’s willing to execute innocent bystanders and crash an entire airplane, you’d better believe it’s a thing.
A very serious thing.
Brown Elementary School. That’s where General’s kids were enrolled. Detroit’s dirty little secret. And by dirty, I mean it in both the literal and nuanced sense of the word.
Dirty because there was arsenic in the soil, which at one point had been a dumping ground for a pharmaceutical tech company. The area was so toxic, grown men on the construction crews were landing in the ER. Now I don’t care who you are. I don’t care if you hate environmentalists and think that vegans and Greenpeace are minions of the antichrist. But seriously, who would ever be okay with building an elementary school in a hazardous waste zone?
Now obviously I’m not saying that the answer to this debacle would be to kidnap a girl, knock out an air marshal, and take over a plane. That’s just lunacy. But the inciting event? The anger and the injustice? I’m all over that.
General took his good old time telling the cameras all about how unfair it was, how the superintendent was to blame, how Detroit had miserably and egregiously let down its children. And you know, if it weren’t for the fact that he’d just hijacked our airplane and was waving that gun around, I might have felt more inclined to give him a good old-fashioned amen or two.
But obviously none of that goes through your head when you see a crazy man waving a gun around. You’re not thinking about those poor kids in Detroit whose health is jeopardized on a daily basis just to save the district a couple extra bucks. You’re not feeling the frustration of these parents who are mostly working class, immigrant, and minority families who lack the political clout to stand up for their kids.
No. You’re staring at that gun. Wondering what would happen to the cabin pressure if it went off. Wondering if the metal hull of the airplane was built to be bulletproof. Wondering if it would be scarier to die in a plane crash or by gunshot wounds.
Hoping he doesn’t notice you. And then when you get your wish, that means you’re left to feel both relieved and guilt-ridden for the rest of your life because he’s turned his wrath on someone else.