coughs on a plane

let's bring back shame

When I was little, I only saw airplanes as the means to go home and the means to leave home. How silly I was. How unimaginative. How small-minded, how limited my thinking. Because today, as an adult, I know better: an airplane is the place where you go to hear a miraculous chorus of phlegm, a collection gathered from millions of uncovered mouths across the United States. Thank God. You used to have to go to a hospital to hear coughs like these. Now, I can just board a flight. Is there a problem modernity won't fix?

On a plane, I hear coughs I haven’t heard anywhere else. I hear coughs that belong in museums, high-vaulted rooms with sets of thematically unsanitized headphones hung over little platforms so that people can step up and briefly cover their ears as they marvel at the sound of saliva enthusiastically leaving the body. On a plane, I hear coughs that very briefly make me empathize with private jet owners.

I am so serious: people have lost the little decorum they possessed since Covid started. There are those to whom a cough unimpeded by a mask, released into a closed metal box, sounds exactly like, maybe even better than, the satisfying sizzle of a grill on the Fourth of July: freedom. For them, though. Not for those of us on the receiving end with nowhere to go but inside our heads and into our newsletter drafts. 

It's like the farther we fly from the earth's core, the closer people become to losing their connection to their senses of sanity and community. Things onto which, when you think about, we should hold even tighter. Especially if you're flying a Boeing.