A good example of sense of entitlement

On the video that follows, they are discussing the issue of whether or not obese people should have to buy two seats on airplanes.



I am of the school of thought which holds that obese people should buy as many seats on any given airplane as they take up. I just don't see how there could be any other school of thought on it. It's quite cut and dry as far as I'm concerned. Pay for as many seats as you take up, plain and simple.

I was actually quite surprised to hear such backlash against that type of sentiment on various online forums. I have noticed quite a change in netizens within the past couple years. I used to get away with certain brands of humor quite easily. For example, it was very socially acceptable to refer to my old First Sergeant as a fat bastard, since he is fat and he is a bastard. These days, if I say anything to that effect, I get chewed out by ten obese forum-goers (almost always American women, occasionally a British woman, and very rarely an American man) for using the word fat as negative, and the like. Of course this has only served to make me think even less of fat people than I already did, but that's a story for another day. Today, we're talking about fat bastards and airplane seats. My main point is that I was completely shocked at how many people thought the airlines should just give the fat people two seats for the price of one. I mean, are you kidding me? Since when is it the fault of any given airline that someone is too fat to fit in a seat?

I equate this expectation of free seats for the obese to Thak and I walking into any given airline terminal and expecting to be sold four seats for the price of three for our little family. See, we have an active 11-month-old toddler boy who WILL NOT ride on a lap. He's just not a cuddly baby like that. Erin would have been at that age, as would many other babies. With this in mind, couldn't we expect a free fourth seat since it's certainly not OUR fault that our 11-month-old won't be content as a lap child, and could we not argue that his active and independent personality should not result in us being charged for a seat for him, whereas a family with a cuddly baby who would be content on a parent's lap could get away without paying for such a thing?

The kid situation is ridiculous, isn't it? Of course it is. Who would ever walk into any given airline terminal and demand a free seat for their kid? Nobody. Yet it's basically the same request that these fat people are making, except there's no kid. It's the left or right half of their butt that needs the extra seat. Yet in the eyes of fat acceptance activists (don't even get me going on these annoying excuses for human flesh) this totally makes a difference.

I say it's horrible from a business standpoint, and bad from a social standpoint. As much as the fat acceptance crew may try to deny it, obesity is a huge problem in our country, and anything we do to enable these people to continue to be fat is doing our nation a huge disservice. With all this talk of universal health care (again, don't get me going on THAT), I think it's far more important than ever to make it as difficult as possible for the obese to continue to be obese, and stop them from developing a sense of entitlement to free perks on the basis of their enormity.