god damn, the only part of this post I’m sure happened as written is that this asshole absolutely stole $4 in change on purpose just to see what would happen

But I try to remind myself every day that the human race doesn’t consist solely of Arthur Chus (or Amanda Marcottes, or Lubos Motls, or SneerClub posters, or Paul Manaforts or Donald Trumps). The world contains millions of women and men of every background and ideology who want actual dialogue, many of whom I’m lucky to count as friends, many of whom I met through this blog. Vulnerability is possible because the world is not uniformly evil.

—but regardless, it’s absolutely somehow our fault. drink!

also I found the actual reason why all of this happened, but Scott buried it in a giant block of text so I’m gonna have to reconstruct a little bullet point timeline:

• when we did arrive, (barely) on time, the contemptuous American Airlines counter staff deliberately refused to check us in, chatting as we stewed impotently, so that we’d no longer be on time and they could legally give our seats away to others, and strand us in an airport with two young kids.
• the only replacement flight was in a different terminal. * in the stress of switching terminals–everything is stressful with two kids in an airport–I lost our suitcase.
• the only shuttle to get back to the terminal went around the long way, and was slow as molasses, and by the time I returned our suitcase had been taken by the bomb squad

so this absolute dipshit started a fight with an airline employee over a flight he was too late to catch (for utterly dipshitted reasons I’ve omitted, see the original post), somehow lost a suitcase, left it unattended for so long that the fucking bomb squad had to be called (which involves automatic confiscation of the suitcase, shutting down the terminal it was left in, and usually detention and a stiff fine for the owner of the luggage — this is usually a big enough problem that it makes the local news), then was caught stealing from a shop after a long day of being belligerent and breaking TSA policy. how is our sweet child not in prison?