Man Arrested for Baggy Pants on Airline

This kind of shit just pisses me off.  It's a story about some dude who had baggy sweatpants that were a little too baggy for US Airways, and so they made a big fucking deal about it and finally removed him from the plane because he wouldn't pull up his pants and had him arrested for trespassing.  Trespassing!  And now there are all these people insisting that this guy had it coming, because people shouldn't have baggy pants that are too baggy and we should all respect the authority of airline employees.

But, no.  This wasn't about baggy sweatpants at all.  I mean, it's an airplane.  The dude was sitting down.  And if they had just left him be, nobody would have noticed that you could see his underwear.  And even if they did, so what?  It's just underwear and you see worse than that at any pool, lake, or beach every day.  This guy was at least an athlete.  I've seen a lot grosser dudes than him wearing speedos, and in front of children, no less.

So it ain't the end of the world.  This is America and if some fool wants to wear his pants to the ground, what's the problem?  They're his pants and he's the one who looks like a fool.  And if you don't want to look at his underwear, don't look.  That's what I do with the fat speedo dudes, and it's worked quite well for me.

Respect My Authority

The only problem here is that the US Airways employees decided to make it a problem and demanded that he respect their authority.  Sure, he wasn't hurting anyone and he was being polite towards them, but that's apparently not enough.  And as a full-fledged red-blooded anti-authoritarian, this shit pisses me off.  Because I'm sick of control freaks telling me what to do.  Schools that dictate what color shoelaces you can wear and employers telling me how to dress.  I thought we settled this shit back in the 60's and the freaks won!

But no, we're now in 2011 and have a shitstorm of real problems in the world, just like we always have, yet some jerkoffs insist that they get to tell us how to dress and will imprison people simply to prove that point.  And that's just fucked up.

And here's the thing: It's not Big Government doing that to people.  That's private industry.  That's the free market that got this guy arrested.  Sure, it was the government that enforced the law, but they had no choice because they had to follow the law.  It was these freaks at US Airways making a big deal about nothing that's the problem.  And even when governments does this sort of thing, it's local governments that enforce dress codes on baggy pants.  The federal government doesn't give a damn how you dress.  And the bigger a government is, the less likely it is to screw with your everyday life.

Big government, I can deal with.  It's authoritarian control freaks that bother me, and more often than not, it's the people without much power who insist upon exercising it the most whenever they can that are the real problem.  I'll take an intrusive Uncle Sam over a snippy Flight Attendant any day.  I understand that they have tough jobs, but screw it, so do the rest of us.  And as much as I'm sure it's not fun dealing with annoying kids and drunk passengers, this was an entirely avoidable situation that didn't require anyone to do a god damn thing.