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Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ve probably heard about Dr. David Dao, the passenger violently removed from a United Airlines flight earlier this week. United Airlines “bumped” Dao, his wife, and two other passengers from the flight to accommodate four crew members. In Dao’s case, this meant slamming his head into an armrest and dragging him, apparently unconscious, from the plane.
Social media is losing its collective mind over this one and rightly so. The level of force used to eject a customer who was merely demanding to receive the service for which he had already paid is beyond egregious.
United has asserted that their choice of passengers to kick off the flight was random and that Dr. Dao left them with no choice than to remove him when he refused to comply, to which I reply, are you kidding me and are you FREAKING KIDDING me, respectively.
To drag his past out and parade it around as if it has something to do with the events that unfolded doesn’t even begin to meet the sniff test.
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United, repeat after me, “We were wrong. We are very sorry. We will not assault our passengers again.” Whatever else you might be thinking of saying, for the love of Pete, just DON’T!
Look, I have no evidence to refute the claim that this choice was random, but real talk, does anyone believe this was truly random? Do they use a random number generator?
As for being left with no other choice than to brutalize a passenger, c’mon, seriously?
Sadly, and beyond all reason, this story has emerged. In a shocking turn of events, <gasp> Dr. Dao has a past!
Apparently, no one at the Courier-Journal has ever done anything illegal, immoral, unethical, icky, or just plain embarrassing. Again, c’mon, seriously? Honestly, I hope never to be involved in anything that actually goes viral for this very reason; we have all, EVERYONE—yes, even you Pure-as-Jesus-Barbie—done something we aren’t particularly proud of and would prefer NOT be splashed on the 6 o’clock evening news.
Back to Dr. Dao. Let me just clear this up for you, in case any of you have any questions. The Security Farce which showed up to escort Dr. Dao off of the plane had no idea who he was, just that he was “non-compliant.” No one had run a background check on this man. No one knew about his past.
To drag his past out and parade it around as if it has something to do with the events that unfolded doesn’t even begin to meet the sniff test. If his past had included prior bad acts committed as a passenger on an aircraft (they don’t), then maybe you could get away with discussing them as part of a pattern of bad behavior in this specific circumstance. Even then, the relevance is a stretch because NO ONE KNEW he had ever had so much as a parking ticket.
And if he had, it would have as much to do with this incident as the events in the Courier-News story. Which is nothing, for those of you at home keeping score.
Brock Turner’s swim times were not relevant to the fact that he sexually assaulted a woman behind a dumpster. Dr. Dao’s past is not relevant to his assault by police on a plane. So really what are the media outlets that are reporting this “news” doing? Brutalizing this man a second time and for reasons as dubious as the first.
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Photo Credit: Getty Images
Thanks, Lisa.
Did you see that part of the video where the guy comes back onto the plane and says, “Just kill me. Just kill me now”?
Tragic.
If only they had offered him a Pepsi.