On my flight from Jakarta to Singapore, I was unwilling witness to an act so heinous and misconceived that it boggled my mind. I shake with rage as I write this, flashing back to the incident. As soon as the seat belt light was off, the stewardesses (flight attendants? air hostesses? sadistic villains?) began moving purposefully around the cabin. Their first act, before the normal drinks, meals, pillows, or reading material, routine was to pass out plastic bags of squeezable squeaky toys to every child on the plane old enough to grasp the proffered parcel with a chubby fist. I am going to give you a minute to digest that one. No, really, take another second. Squeaky toys. Children. Airplane. It was like watching someone pass out copies of The Bell Curve to a plane-load of right wing talk radio hosts.
So wrong, on so many levels, that I don’t even know where to begin, so I’ll just wade in and start flailing. First, the packaging. You can’t find a plastic bag anymore that doesn’t have a choking hazard, this bag is not a toy warning printed on it, and here they are passing them out to children. Each bag is sealed by a folded piece of cardboard secured to the plastic with ummm…two metal staples? Here ya go, kiddies. Hey, if you are having trouble getting it open, just use your teeth, okay? Not that some of the toddlers receiving the bags were old enough to even have teeth, mind you.
As to the toys themselves, and I say toys because there were more than one in each bag; yeah, two squeaky toys per bag, one for each under-aged fist to ensure stereo irritation from every child. Anyways, what’s the first place these toys are going to go, assuming the kids aren’t already choking on the plastic bag or the staples? Into their pieholes, of course. I’m all about exposing kids to germs to encourage a healthy immune system, but I guarantee that whatever filthy sweatshop these toys, made of snacklicious low grade petrochemical ingredients, came out of did not have children’s health in mind during production, packaging, and shipping.
Okay, I’ll admit it, I’m no crusader for child safety and probably wouldn’t flinch if the stews were passing out sleeping pills, bourbon bottles with rubber nipples affixed, or rolls of duct tape for the kids. I must know, though, what criminally shortsighted corporate buffoon seeking in-flight entertainment solutions for the younger crowd hit the send key on the shipping order for SQEAKY TOYS? Please note a characteristic lack of capitalization, underlining, and italics in past entries and understand that if I were relating this story in person, I would be screaming the above words. Whoever made the decision to take the annoyance public at the ‘approve the distribution of noisemakers to children at the beginning of a two hour flight’ policy meeting must be willfully malicious, deaf, a direct descendant of Torquemada, or, at the very least, terminally myopic.
Somehow these toys made their way down the pipeline, though, the orders passing across the desks and the toys passing through the shipping channels of a whole army of people who didn’t give a second thought to the end result. Eventually boxes of squeaky toys made their way aboard planes and into the hands of stewardesses, the people responsible for not only your comfort during the flight, but your safety and, in the case of emergency, even your life. Bad omen if they lack the judgment to realize that handing out irritants to kids is the wrong call. Who’s to know if the sky hostesses make the conscious, sane choice not distribute the noisemakers? They have plenty enough autonomy to simply not pass them out, right? I doubt there is some sort of sophisticated distribution monitoring system. Warehouse guy: “Hey, you need another case of squeaky toys?” Head stewardess: “No thanks, all good here. Not many kids aboard lately.” Simple. But no, smiles all around and here you go, junior, something to annoy us all with for the duration of the flight. You can’t tell me that even the most jaded, inured, stoic flight attendant can tune out a ruckus that sounds like ten litters of puppies set loose in the toy section of the pet store. What’s next, handfuls of Flinstones shapes amphetamines to ensure that the brat behind you will be kicking the back of your seat for the duration of the flight?
As a last resort, we can surely depend on those directly responsible for the children’s safety and public behavior, right? Thank goodness for the good judgment of parents, gatekeepers and guardians of not only their offspring but those who their offspring’s behavior may impact. Right? If my flight is any indicator of the present state of parenting, our future generations are doomed. I always considered parents who bought their children toys with loud sirens, speakers, cymbals, and bells to be masochistic, but it’s their choice to turn their own homes into aural chaos and call it cute. Keep it at home. If someone was cruising the aisles passing out whiskey and fireworks, you wouldn’t let your kid have them, would you? So why noisemakers? Why? Parents of the world unite under a flag of decency, common sense, or, at the very least, respect for the sanity of those exposed to your children’s antics. Squeaky toys for my toddler on a trans-oceanic flight crowded with innocent strangers? No thank you, stewardess. So easy, so logical, so obvious.
Ever get into a situation where a lifetime of moral habituation and pack behavior tendencies prevents you from committing an act that, stripped of its sociopathic underpinnings, makes a lot of sense? If so, then you will understand the vivid technicolor detail of my whole flight-worth of fancy visualizing a hunt for everyone responsible for the manufacture, sales, purchase, distribution, storage, and dispersal of cheap squeaky toys on airplanes .
