I’m sick of designing the entire world of adult commerce and transit to the sensibilities of a six year old child. Airlines are under assault from peevish parents taken back by films with violence or sex in them that’s shown on the big screen in the bulkhead area of commercial aircraft. I never watch these films. I’m not interested. I pop pills and fall asleep and wake up an hour out from touchdown.

But apparently the films have parents riled up that precious, innocent junior will have his life ruined forever should he see someone’s head blown off by a shotgun blast in the process of the unfolding celluloid feature flickering in front of them.

Children flying across country or overseas on commercial aircraft have no right whatsoever to deprive the 98% of grown adults on that plane from watching a drama or a comedy that contains content geared toward Big People. If your priceless little Fauntleroy or Princess Mia can’t handle the flick, slip them a mickey. Shove an Alprazolam down their pre-adolescent throats and send them off to dream of princes, planets and spaceships. But don’t start writing airline CEO’s demanding G-rated swill just so the two or three kids scrunched in beside mom and dad don’t grow up having hemorrhoids because they saw a man kiss a woman’s bare breast or a Spartan athlete shove a lance into another warriors spleen.

Airlines might want to inaugurate “Kiddie Flights” so crumb snatchers can fly from Atlanta to Pittsburgh in play pens or sit in sandboxes set up in the back of the plane or simply take out the center aisle of seats in the wide bodies and put playground slides and bounce around air pens in their stead. Have flight attendants dress as Dumbo or Pluto and serve kids Kool-Aid, cookies, and ice cream. Show movies featuring dancing and singing cartoon penguins and ground squirrels. But since only two or three kids crowd most commercial flights, this option looks weak. No profit in flying a platoon of rug rats o’er fields of waving grain.

So shut up. Your kids aren’t as important as the deal the salesman has to close before his company goes upside down into bankruptcy. And if a little violence and mature sex settles his mind and takes away the tension of imminent demise for a few hours, that’s a plus. If you think your child is in danger of having his entire existence on earth corrupted by a film shown for adults on any of today’s profit starved airlines, I suggest you rent a car and drive to grandma’s house. But don’t take away the privilege of adulthood from those of us who’ve racked up a lot of free miles making it this far into our often complicated and traumatic lives. Let the kid pick up those worldly perks for himself. He’ll be a better adult for it if you do.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 26th, 2007 at 3:12 pm and is filed under Stuff I know, Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.