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T minus 2 hours 12 minutes
Kennedy watched while the flight attendant escorted the family down the aisle toward the exit. She had never seen anything like that happen before and couldn’t stop an uneasy feeling from sloshing around in her gut, the same foreboding Scrooge must have experienced at the London Stock Exchange when he listened to the businessmen joke about their colleague’s lonesome death. She was glad her roommate was giving BO Dude an Academy Award-worthy lecture against racism, or else Willow probably would have shoved her sermon down Kennedy’s throat instead.
Getting a family of six off the plane took a quarter of an hour at least before the captain made his first address to the passengers. It was the typical stuff Kennedy had learned to tune out after a decade of international travel, but he included a brief comment about the Mennonites.
“Of course, safety is our first priority on this flight. We had a family choose to deboard the plane a few minutes ago, and I’d like to thank our flight attendant Tracy in the back for making that transition as smooth as possible. I want you to know we have a commitment to each passenger’s personal well-being, and if there’s anything we can do to make your time with us more comfortable, please don’t hesitate to ask your nearest flight attendant.”
After that, it was more of the usual drivel about seat trays, floatation devices, and oxygen masks.
Willow leaned back in her seat with a huff. “Some people are stubborn jerks.”
“Didn’t go too well?” Kennedy wondered why Willow wasted her breath on the smelly Seahawks fan but didn’t bother saying so.
“I just don’t get it. Are we still living in the fifties or something?” Willow crossed her arms. “I assumed the human race would have evolved a little bit farther by now.” She rolled her eyes. “Can’t even get on an airplane wearing foreign clothes without having racist bigots assume you’re a terrorist.”
Kennedy didn’t know what to say. Chances were the two men in turbans were polite, respectable travelers who passed the same security screens as everyone else. But wasn’t there the slightest possibility ... She thought about how loosely their clothes fit. How many bombs or bomb pieces would fit strapped beneath ...
No, now she was the one racial profiling. There were ample security measures, the TSA, the no-fly list, enough safeguards in place that innocent citizens could travel in peace and safety.
Right?
Kennedy tried to recall the details from a news article her dad had sent her earlier that semester. Eleven men from Jordan boarded a plane and freaked the other passengers out by their bizarre behavior, passing items in bags throughout the flight, congregating in the aisles, spending five or ten minutes at a time in the bathroom one right after another. The journalist who broke the story, a woman who had been on board and witnessed the suspicious behavior firsthand, discovered that airlines were fined if they held more than two passengers of Middle Eastern decent for extra questioning on any particular flight. Even if the men had raised security flags in the pre-boarding process, the airlines couldn’t have taken any extra precautions against a group that large. There were folks who believed that what the journalist encountered was a dry run, a dress-rehearsal of sorts for putting together a bomb mid-flight, while some postulated that the men planned to take over the plane but experienced some kind of glitch in the air. Of course, others claimed the journalist was a paranoid, racist bigot who needed to shut her mouth instead of accusing innocent, peaceful travelers on unsubstantiated and somewhat vague grounds.
Kennedy knew plenty of Muslim students from Harvard, knew they weren’t the crazed extremists the media made them out to be. She would be incensed on their behalf if they were made to endure an onslaught of extra or humiliating security measures simply because of their race or religion. But common courtesy and political correctness had to end somewhere, didn’t they? At least when it came to protecting an airplane full of innocent civilians. Or was that the kind of reasoning that allowed cops like the one that abused her and her best friend last year to keep on wreaking their own kind of havoc on justice?
“Bunch of bigots,” Willow muttered, “holding up a full flight because a few of the passengers were born in the Middle East.”
Kennedy opened up her Gladys Aylward book. Maybe Willow was right. Maybe the Mennonites were racist jerks, xenophobic Americans scared of any traveler who looked even remotely different.
But Willow hadn’t heard their entire conversation, either. Hadn’t heard the fear in the woman’s voice. Not hatred. Not prejudice. Actual terror for her family’s safety. Had the family done the right thing? Mennonites were supposedly a fairly religious group, right? Did the woman have that gift of discernment Christians sometimes talked about, that ability to hear the Holy Spirit’s warnings more acutely than the average believer? If God told the woman the flight wasn’t safe, did that mean Kennedy and Willow were about to head into trouble? But if that was the case, why wouldn’t God have warned her, too? It didn’t seem fair.
Then again, if God told Kennedy to get off the plane, if the Holy Spirit impressed on her soul that she needed to leave, would she? And risk Willow thinking she was a xenophobic racist bigot?
Or would she fasten her seatbelt, sit tight, and try to convince herself everything would be fine?
Everything would be fine, wouldn’t it? Kennedy stared at the pages of her book, remembering the way God had protected Gladys Aylward and the orphans under her care so many years ago. He would take care of Kennedy that way, too.
Wouldn’t he?