The back of the plane

There was a full sized rat lying in the middle of the sidewalk in front of my son’s school this morning. The rat looked like it had gorged in the nearby trash cans and had fallen into a drunken stupor overnight. Jeez, I thought, now when my kids are adults they are going to say, about their inner city childhood, “we had to step over dead rats on the way to school.”

The rat was lying outside of the fenced-in concrete schoolyard where the sixth graders socialize at lunchtime. The first time my co-worker saw the playground he said it looked remarkably like a prison yard. It is a small concrete gathering with two basketball hoops arranged along one wall, so that a full-court game must be played in a u-shape. On rainy days the kids crowd underneath the scaffolding opposite the basketball wall.

This is one of Manhattans’ best academic public middle schools. My son worked hard to get admitted, which includes high test scores, a teacher’s recommendation, and an interview. It’s not like he had many Mexican-origin classmates in his elementary school. But now that he is wading through middle school he has tired of teaching his name to everyone. It is “Tomas”, not “Thomas”. Pronounced like “toe” plus “moss”. His humanities teacher assigned an essay about names, and he wrote that he planned to change his name to “Tom” or “Tommy” because he hated being called “Thomas”.

I heard a presentation a few days ago in New Mexico about the health impact of identity. The main thesis was about the larger health implications of major societal discriminations, like racism and homophobia. But the researcher also talked about microstresses – the everyday indignities that are sometimes clear and often fuzzy but that collectively can become more debilitating than major stressful life events. The small ways that we communicate status in our society aren’t so much invisible as much as they are managed to the point where they sink to the subconscious. It happens to all of us, most days, even the days we choose to ignore it. It is rampant in the world of advertising and entertainment, and it seeps into press releases and other public relations efforts more easily than we’d like to imagine.

The airline industry leads the corporate world in their effort to reinforce status. On my flight to New Mexico I sat alone in my row; in fact, no one else was sitting within fifteen rows of me. But in the back of the plane everyone was smushed in three to a row. Once the doors closed the sardine passengers begin to spread out, causing the flight attendant to flap her arms and grab the microphone. “Stop changing seats!” she announced urgently. She was standing in the aisle next to my row. “Stop! Stop! You people in the back,” she said punching her finger at them, “you did not pay for the seating with the extra leg room.” She swept her hand across the fifteen empty rows plus mine. “These people did. It’s not fair for you to sit in these other rows. Unless you’re willing to upgrade your ticket, you need to stay-in-your-seat.” She said the last words in a slow staccato, like she was talking to a mob that was on the verge of storming the embassy.

I looked back at the angry mob. They were my people but I could feel them seething at me, as if I had sentenced them to being corralled in to the back of the plane. Technically I didn’t pay for my legroom either, even though I might argue that I deserved it for literally running from Terminal B to the very end of Terminal C in Chicago where I barely missed my connection. The gate agent upgraded me on my alternate flight. I don’t even use the treadmill; I only use the elliptical machine, because running is jarring. I had earned my legroom.

A few minutes later the flight attendant reappeared holding a tray of drinks. “First class doesn’t want these beverages!” She was very excited. “Go ahead and choose one, why not?” she said, as though she was offering me leftover pearl necklaces instead of rejected tomato juice. I asked her if I could give permission for the sardine passengers to spread out into my fifteen rows. If the only thing standing in their way was the insult to the passengers who had paid the extra fee, I was willing to waive my right to be insulted. “That won’t be possible!” she snapped and then stiffly returned to first class with the second hand juice.

The truth for my son to discover is that even if his new friends call him “Tommy”, he will always walk through this world as “Tomas”. He will step over rats if it means that at the end of the sidewalk is the best education his city offers. He will play on a U-shaped basketball court if that is how he can stay fit. He will learn how to measure the worth of his daily indignities. As he grows up he will decide what role he plays in societies indignities, whether he finds himself on playgrounds or in airports.

At the New Mexico conference we saw laid bare how words, and their context, matters to the health of our society. Perhaps suffering in the back of the plane isn’t a human rights issue. But recognizing the status that words convey is the soul of good communications.