Here's to the Hero - Bull Feathers

Jet Blue is not known as a top tier airline. Neither is Steven Slater a top tier employee with a service attitude..

Slater is the flight attendant who went off on a truculent passenger a few days ago. After a profantiy laced tirade inside the Jet Blue airliner, he went for a beer in the planes refreshment center, then engaged the escape slide and went down to temporary freedom. Slater was eventually caught and charged with multiple crimes. His bail was set at a whopping $2,500.

Slater's trigger point was a passenger who got up before the plane had "docked" at the departure ramp and come to a complete halt. The passenger accessed the overhead luggage bin and Slater tried to stop her until the plane had come to a stop. Such is the regulation set by government aviation authorites. Slater, a service employee as are all flight attendants, tried to stop the activity and get the passenger seated. She refused and the argument ensued.

Slater has received adulation on facebook, had a defense fund offered to defray the huge $2,500 bail. What else would you expect for the crime of grand theft beer can and creating America's first dry water slide. The slide likely will cost ten's of thousand of dollers to replace and re-install, which elevates the dollar amount of the crime.

Why the adulation for Slater? He is a service employee who lost his cool during working hours. What happens to cops that do this? Fired. What happens to office workers who berate or assault their peers? Bounced out the top window of the executive suite. Slater is the same.

To say he is a hero is to demean and diminish the designation "hero". Go to you tube and search on the song "Hears to the Heros", the military tribute. Can you listen to that song, see the video and look at Slater the same way? We tend elevate the common, everyday man or woman when he or she struggles against the daily challenges of life and emerge victorious. Does Slater fit any of the above? Not really.

Does he deserve the notoriety he is receiving? That is more a function of society's fascination with the reach of the internet, rather than the substance of what that reach can provide. The great inconsistecy in this is the wide publication of the event compared to the punishment the law requires. Why is a guy who blows up at a passenger he could have handled less angrily, then helps himself to a cold alchoholic beverage on the way out a door intended to be an enerfency exit, so widely known?

We have met the enemy and he is us (Pogo comic strip). We crave information no matter how insignificant, just so we know it. It's a human circus.