(pode ler este artigo em português aqui)
It’s inevitable that we talk about what happened to that passenger on that United flight if we’re talking about the United States right now. The thing is, it shows us something about where we’ve come as a culture that definitely won’t sit easy.
1. We can’t control our outrage
We’re at a point where it’s practically possible to track the sequence of events each time this kind of news emerges. The United case wasn’t any different. Our world is one where video cameras are available on any portable device, with new rules allowing them to be used even in the air. Of course the images of the middle-aged man being dragged off the plane didn’t take their time to appear. Nor did the collective outrage toward United over what happened.
What happened was horrible and the company’s reaction only made it worse, unquestionably. But the tragic sequence has already become predictable—every attack on humanity, on our dignity, follows the same line. It’s become a formula for sensationalism, without being the Onion. We get outraged over headlines and short videos and lose both context and a more complete understanding of what happens in these situations. It’s not difficult to understand why this doesn’t help solve the underlying problem.
2. Companies have already learned to commercialize our outrage—but aren’t free from it, not even United
After what happened in Chicago, United lost around 900 million dollars. It’s an impressive sum, but it’s not a one-off. Just before them, Pepsi launched an ad campaign commercializing the images of popular struggle and was excoriated across social media for it. Companies already see our outrage as a source of profit and apply it in their campaigns to varying degrees of success. Except that, sometimes, the huge profits they hope for end up being just the opposite. The power of outrage isn’t controlled by companies, much as they try to.
3. We have a police brutality problem
At the root of it all, the real problem wasn’t what United did so much as the police unit that handled the removal of the passenger who refused to leave the plane. Once United was forced to call the police to handle the belligerent passenger, the responsibility for what happened passed to the police. In the tradition of the Chicago police, it wasn’t all calm and polite, as we saw from the many videos. That’s the problem.
Since the death in 2014 of the black teen Michael Brown at the hands of a cop who would be later exonerated, police brutality and injustice have surged in American politics. There are innumerable cases, and each week we have some other, yet another example of this disservice to our population. And in these three years since, little or nothing have been done to confront police aggression, police militarization, or clearly-documented injustices committed by the police. We have a police brutality problem that is aggravated by advances in technology and increases in police budgets. Without confronting this problem, there will be more United-style controversies.