The Joy of an Airport Beer
The column that once and for all proves that beer is the drink of the Revolution
If you take all the humans who have ever lived, I have been in more airports than 99.9% of them. Take that Alexander “The Great.” More like Alexander “The Great At Not Riding In Airplanes.” This incredibly useless statistic does not tell anyone anything. I have probably taken planes slightly more than then your Average 2019 American citizen, but nothing approaching Up In The Air levels of sky miles. I live in Chicago, my parents reside in Montana, and the United States’ lack of high-speed rail makes flying the easiest/only way to see them. I have also been lucky enough to have taken several overseas trips, considerably bumping up the number of miles I have hurtled through the sky while trapped in an aluminum can. All this makes me not an expert at travel but at least well-acquainted enough to comment on it.
But you did not come here for advanced statistics about my flight patterns. You came here because this showed up in your inbox and you had nothing better to do than read it, or you saw the word “beer” in a headline and clicked on it in some misguided attempt to get said “beer.” So no more chatter about distances flown in 2019. I’ll switch to beer. Eventually.
Airports suck. Especially post-9/11 airports. Longer and longer lines, invasive security measures, high ticket costs, and a catastrophic environmental toll have all conspired to turn airports into too-bright prisons of fast-food and disposable fiction. These developments in airport technology have made it so that the experience of flying – literal, actual, spitting in the face of God flight – feels more like a journey through the very pits of hell, directed by the unholy triumvirate of Lucifer, Satan, and Beezelbub rather than a fun adventure. Unless you can afford to only fly first-class, or own a private jet – PJ squad what up! –people have just resorted to gritting their teeth and baring it as best they can.
And now I’ll write about beer. Fliers mutual understanding of the horrors of those fluorescent-lit, grey-carpeted terminals has created a space where no one bats an eye if you order a beer at 8am on a Tuesday. This remains the only good thing airports have wrought.
In our normal non-airport lives most bars do not open until mid-afternoon, at the earliest. Unless you live in a factory or mining town where the bars stay open for people getting off the night shift, most places will not sell alcoholic beverages that early in the morning. On top of it being logistically difficult, most people would still refuse due to the amount of the societal opprobrium heaped upon anyone having a breakfast beer. In an airport however, no one gives a shit.
This space of agreed upon suspension of social norms is a powerful one. Of course, having one or two beers before a morning flight will not cure anything or solve any of the problems created as a result of capitalism, but it does show a way forward. The airport denizens have decided as a group that shit sucks and it has to change. While that change, drinking a morning beer free from judgement, won’t fundamentally alter the capital-labor paradigm, it does show that people can transform the system. People agreed that a problem existed and then came up with a solution. All without talking to one another. Now imagine if they did talk to one another. If they planned, organized and agreed on a truly transformative solution! We could get rid of the problems of airports forever. We must harness the power of beer to enrich our future.
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