02-16-2010
10:27 AM
I must say I find a lot of the posts here naive and simplistic. In a civilized society we have to tolerate and accommodate each other, to some extent. The posts about having to "climb over...obese" people in the event of an emergency ignores the fact that there might also be small children, older or disabled people on that same plane in need of different levels of assistance - should an airline be allowed to keep those types of people off, or charge them different rates? I'm 6'2" and weigh about 200 pounds, On most flights, I'm sure that the person sitting next to me wishes I was smaller; when the person in front of me puts their seat back, it's very uncomfortable. In most of these situations, the airline and the gov't needs its customers/citizens to show a reasonable amount of respect and compassion for these issues to be mitigated. And they need policies and laws to adjudicate more contentious ones. I find it disheartening that so many of the posts are so black/white, and lack the common courtesy required to understand either that your size might in fact be an imposition on someone else (including an airline trying to run a business, e.g. "make the seats bigger!"), OR that someone could use a little compassion (e.g. "I paid for this seat!")
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