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If You’re Fat, You Can Sit Next to Me on the Plane
And not feel ashamed
I just finished reading yet another piece on Medium beating up on fat people, written by a retired psychotherapist of all people. As per usual, in addition to all the bullshit objections about having to pay more for health insurance and healthcare because of fat people (never mind there’s a million other personal behaviors that lead to bad health and higher costs) the complaint that perhaps galls me the most is people who bitch about the supposed horrors of having to sit next to a fat person on an airplane.
We allow ourselves to openly abuse overweight people on airplanes, everyone from other passengers to the airline industry itself. I recall one flight on which the two morbidly obese ticketholders were seated next to each other in the very back row of the plane. It was a Black woman and a white man who probably didn’t have a thing in common except for the look of deep shame and fear in both their eyes that was so awful it haunts me still. The one bathroom on the plane was all the way at the front, but there was no consideration for how they might get there. They didn’t move a muscle the whole flight, and both looked as though they wanted to disappear. I wanted to hug them both.
Another time, a somewhat larger woman sat next to me on a flight. She wasn’t even that terribly…
