Here's the thing about the Kevin Smith Southwest Airlines incident: Instead of complaining about his treatment he should be thanking those flight attendants and that pilot for a moment of honesty that he was probably sorely in need of.
I've never been as big as Smith, but relatively speaking anyway, I wasn't too far off when I tipped the scales at 123 at the tender age of ten years old. Only my wake-up call didn't come from a flight attendant but from a little girl who couldn't have been more than five years old. I was in the middle of a soccer game, intently playing my position (goalie -- what else?) and minding my own business when she walked around the goal post, looked me squarely in the eyes and blurted out, "You're fat!"
I know, I know, psychiatrists are going to say I was traumatized by the incident, but I don't think so. I think it was a gift. A gift of honesty. The kind of gift that big-time directors too often surrounded by sycophants don't often receive.
My five-year old friend was absolutely right. I was fat. And her innocent comment spurred me on to do something about my situation. And if Kevin Smith were smart, instead of twittering insults about Southwest Airlines, he would instead thank those flight attendants for their honesty and use the incident as a chance to improve his health and the comfort of those in the seats next to him on his next flight.
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Smith knows he's fat, that's why he paid for two seats to begin with. Southwest didn't provide him with any lightning bolt of a revelation, instead they set him up for a humiliation and I do not care how fat anyone is....that was a cruel and unnecessary thing to do.
I also find it interesting that Smith has a new movie premiering on Feb 26th, called "Cop Out". Was this all a publicity stunt on Smiths part??
I don't think this was publicity stunt unless South West was in on it.
i know you will thank me for my honesty when i tell you you are a jerk, and an unfeeling one at that.
i know you will go home and honestly think over your behavior and change it instantly so that you will not risk being jerky a second time.
it will be good for you to know that you are a jerk, and my comment will spur you on to change your situation.
and perhaps to understand there is a difference between being called fat by a five year old who was probably innocent of malice and being publicly embarrassed by two flight attendants in front of a plane load of people.
i hope other people have taken the time to give you the advice you so sorely need and also told you you are a jerk, and i know that your next column will be a thank you to all the people out here who have done you the kindness of publicly pointing out your flaws. i know there are lots of people out here who are honest enough to do that.
But that's different than the kind of self realization you get when, for instance, you see a photo or video of yourself taken when you weren't aware of it. It's not the same as the fixed mirror image that you normally see of yourself.
This sort of unexpected third-party *reframing" of your obesity can indeed be new information to the obese person and quite jarring. Mr. Smith experienced a version of this on the airplane. It can be motivating if you take it in a constructive, positive way, but Mr. Smith is not taking it that way.
Decades of medical data and our own national history prove that longterm weight loss is extremely rare. 85% to 98% of people who lose weight will regain within 2-3 years. Repeatedly losing weight and regaining correlates with poor health and shortened lifespan.
People who lose significant amounts of weight and stay at such lower weights are the exceptions that prove the rule: fat people don't choose to be fat any more than thin people choose to be thin!
Researchers have tried repeatedly to document a difference between the eating of fat people and thin people, with no significant results. Researchers have compared groups of people who exercise routinely to people who do not and find that exercisers only weigh about 10 pounds less than those who are sedentary.
Good nutrition and regular exercise are not magic pills to make us thin, they're magic pills to make us all healthy in our diverse body shapes and heights and weights.
The proper response to prejudice and discrimination (like that exhibited by SouthWorst) is never to expect the people targeted by hate to change in order to please our oppressors. The proper response is for everyone to take our part in dismantling the prejudice. Because pervasive meanness sucks for everyone, whether you fit in the chair on a plane or not.
Crowing about your unearned thin privilege and encouraging segregationist policies? Totally uncool.
There is a price to pay for true art. Kevin Smith’s one spoken line in the movie “Clerks” was one of the best movie lines of all time: “There are a lot of beautiful women in this world, but they don’t all bring you lasagna for lunch”. Had Kevin Smith been more concerned with his weight, he might have said salad instead of lasagna, but who wants a woman who brings him a salad for lunch?
It isn't as simple as he was too fat to fly. The customer service was horrendous, with no one ever giving him a straight answer, and what explanations were given were fishy. In the end, one thing is clear - there are no rules the airline puts out there. They wait until you are in your seat and make a subjective judgement there, calling you out in front of the whole plane. From Southwest's own posted guidelines for when a second ticket is required, Kevin Smith did not require one. Additionally, the people he sat next to said they had no problem with him sitting there.
By the time he got to fly again, the twittering was going on, and Southwest was realizing what happened and was working to placate him. Yet, besides that, when he boards a plane a couple gates away (where certainly they knew what happened), they did the same thing to a woman sitting next to him. Which makes you wonder, how often does it happen? And with the vague guidelines, is it a safety issue, or a case of forcing someone to buy a second ticket or lose their flight?