Out Rage!

The little town of Juneau.

A lot of rage on the news this morning.

There was the sorry spectacle of a woman who couldn't get chicken McNuggets during the breakfast service and so tried to push herself through the drive-through window and actually socked the employee working the window twice.
Seriously.
My son has worked this crappy job, not for McD's, but for another fast food joint, and whilst I am impressed with and astonished by the level of hygiene the place insists on, I was equally astonished by the level of abuse these workers have to face. Add to that actual physical violence and this bizarre sense of entitlement that some people have, I can't begin to understand why anyone thinks they have the right to treat other human beings like this, nor that they have some right to be able to just drive up to a window in their oversized vehicle and be served whatever food item they happen to fancy.

Then there was the incredible, changing story of Stephen Slater, the flight attendant.
On the first report on CBC, Stephen, a 38 year-old flight attendant, asked a man who had stood up and was opening the overhead locker whilst the plane was still moving, to sit down. The man let Stephen have it with a stream of verbal that couldn't be repeated on CBC, at which point the item of luggage fell out of the locker, hit Stephen on the head, who then proceeded to let out his own invective, stomped off, taking a bottle of beer with him, activated the emergency chute, which he used to exit the plane, went to the staff car park and drove himself home. Later he was arrested by the Police.
The second report, not ten minutes later, made it seem as though Slater himself was more to blame, by leaving out the passenger's bad language and the force with which the flight attendant was hit.
On the radio, later, the male passenger had become a woman and the whole interchange had been elongated. Stephen had now been with the airline for 28 years, which meant that he must have started with them at the age of ten.
Suffice to say, the real point, in my eyes, is yet again how staff are treated by customers. Apparently a lot of people feel this way and Stephen Slater can hopefully look forward to a career on the talk show circuit.

Why, wondered the CBC, was there more outrage over the awful situation in Pakistan than the awful flooding in China?
A British reporter explained very clearly, so that even those who hadn't yet had their critical number of cups of coffee could understand, that the Chinese government were well enough staffed, resourced and prepared, to be doing everything that could be done for their own people, what was making things difficult were natural circumstances, that no amount of equipment nor drafting of additional machinery, could improve.
Pakistan on the other hand, was not dealing well with its natural disaster because its government was not helping, the President had gone off on a tour of Europe whilst his country drowned and starved, resources were not getting through and the people worst affected were getting, basically, no help at all.

Lastly, rage I anticipate, or rather, rage I DON'T anticipate. Rod Stewart is to become a father again at the age of 65. And this, to my mind, is entirely his beeswax. But when a woman of any remotely advanced age becomes a mother, there is generally an outcry from people who think it's some kind of public outrage and something they should personally have a say in, rather in the same way they think they have the rights to make decisions about any woman's reproductive rights.