Lately I’ve found myself binging a show on the Paramount Network called ‘Air Disasters.’
As the name implies, this docuseries explores numerous airplane crashes over the decades, some well-known, others not so much. It documents tragedies as they unfolded, putting together eye witness testimonies, data recovered from the crash sites, and commentary from aviation experts. Most interestingly, it catalogs the sequence of events that led to each individual disaster.
Those closest to me know I used to have a terrible fear of flying. It wasn’t always that way. I’ve flown, mostly alone, since I was five-years-old, a child with family scattered across the continent and a single mother who needed a break once in a while. Adulthood can sap us of our adventurous spirits, mostly because we suddenly become aware of our mortality and how much we have to lose. At some point, I can’t remember when, flying became a nerve-wracking experience. For years I avoided it when possible, and drank heavily when I had to fly.
I say all this to point out that it might seem absurd for someone with a fear of flying to binge a show about plane crashes. On the surface it might, but I find great comfort in the detective work the show chronicles. Knowledge is power, and knowing the science behind flight and the science and procedure behind flight disasters makes me feel more confident about the entire process.
What I find most interesting about the cases highlighted in the show is that while weather occasionally plays a factor in these accidents, nearly all of them boil down to human error, and typically not just one human error, but a series of errors. A dangerous but solvable problem will emerge, the crew makes one bad or poorly timed decision which leads to the next bad decision which leads to the next bad response and suddenly all hell breaks loose. What could have been simply a scary situation turns into a fatal one. Every disaster is imbued with the same quality…chaos. At some point, problems turn into complete and utter chaos and the flight crew can no longer make good decisions. Once chaos enters the equation, the freefall begins. It plays out time and time again.
This is how it feels to live in America these days. It feels like we are in a constant state of chaos. It feels like we are reeling out of control in nearly every sector. Every day we are treated to a new collapse, a new insanity, a new mind-boggling disintegration of old norms.
The banking sector is on the verge of collapse.
Higher education is actively banning discussion and disagreement.
Government schools are teaching girls they can be boys, and vice versa.
School board meetings are turning into battlefields.
The airline industry is falling apart.
The railroad industry is falling apart.
Fentanyl is killing our sons and daughters at an alarming rate.
The supply chain is broken and getting worse.
Our cities are melting into crime-ridden drug dens that are pushing out business, both big and small, and driving away families in droves.
Our national air space is being violated by the Chinese with impunity.
Our cultural norms are in freefall and the effect is dizzying. If you feel like everything is chaotic right now, that’s because it is. This isn’t just a matter of politics as usual based on who’s in the White House at what time. Things are genuinely awful and no one seems to be in charge. The pilot has lost control of the plane.
Like the accidents I watch unfold on that docuseries, what is happening to us now is the result of a million tiny decisions, and a few big ones. Every time we’ve had the ability to pull out of this barrel roll, the political class and their sycophant voters make another ill-fated decision that just makes the problem worse.
Our first bad decision was handing the White House to Joe Biden. Everything fanned out from there. Every person who is “in charge” of something in the Biden administration is making terrible, perplexing decisions, as are their private sector counterparts. We’re picking leaders based on how they look and who they say they are inside, rather than their qualifications. We’re letting children make irreversible decisions about their bodies while we deny the same choice to adults who prefer not to take an experimental vaccine. We’re letting fragile young adults push away knowledge and learning on their college campuses in favor of emotion. We are literally dumbing down the future with each new “trigger warning” and every new diversity, equity and inclusion demand.
One weak decision after another is rendering the fuselage of America vulnerable. One weak leader after another is thrusting us headfirst toward disaster.
Chaos is everywhere right now. The helpless sense of weightlessness in this descent is excruciating.
But we are not completely done for. Many of those air disasters I watched could have been prevented with just a little more time, a couple of more seconds, a few thousand more feet. Believe it or not, sometimes the solution to a crashing plane is to point the nose directly downward before pulling out. It takes a brave man to do such a thing, as it defies logic in a moment of panic.
Our nation is in desperate need of men who can make the hard choices that need to happen to pull us out of this descent. We need voters with the stomach to withstand the process of finding those men. The primary season has already begun, but so many voters fall to pieces along the way. Can we keep it together long enough to elect someone who is not the crash test dummy known as Joe Biden? Are there yet a few good men willing to take the controls and muscle us out of sure disaster?
Does America have a few thousand feet left in the journey to pull it out?
What do think? I’d love to hear your thoughts…and your encouragement, if you have any to give, because this turbulence is killing me.
