It seems like a big contradiction to me.
In post-pandemic times (if they ever arrived), travel explodes, hotels, and planes fill up. Not that it’s just a tourism phenomenon. In everything that happens now with an audience presence, there is an exponential audience presence.
Sports competitions around the world? Public bombing. São Paulo Book Biennial? Record (or almost) visitors. Delivery of gastronomy awards from Prazeres da Mesa magazine? I’ve never seen it so crowded.
It seems like a logical thing. After so long locked up at home, and after the quarantine for a long time without major face-to-face events, people are thirsty for an “agglomeration of good” – that is, to participate in relevant events and, at the same time, to be able to fraternize with their similar.
Where, then, is the contradiction mentioned in the first paragraph? Not in a non-existent opposition between people’s desire to find themselves and the dangers that still reside (literally) in the air.
What catches my attention is, yes, the lack of sensitivity of those responsible for public spaces in the face of this natural desire for people to unburden themselves. Even more considering that this race for the reunion places can bring a lot of profit to those responsible for them – who could, in return, offer kind compensation.
What I see ahead, however, is quite different. I take as an example the studies that have been carried out on how to optimize the space of aircraft, and which, in general, are aimed at piling more people (and more money) into less space.
Maybe you remember the brilliant idea they had some time ago, to make “standing seats” on airplanes – practically butt supports in which the aerial victim just leaned on a vertical support.
Now it’s the turn of the “double decked” seats – with successive rows on two levels, with the lower passenger having the claustrophobic view of the back of the upper seat.
No surprise, all within the capitalist logic of earning the most at the expense of the maximum suffering of the maximum number of people. A regular old man.
It is also good to know that, at the same time, there are people going in the opposite direction, thinking about the well-being of their fellow human beings. No, don’t get me wrong, it’s not the tycoons (or those who live off their crumbs, especially when they’re publicly traded) of the airlines. It’s just the usual dreamers.
This is the case of designers who create things that, most of the time, will not leave the drawing boards (that is, the screens). For example, at the recent fair AIX (Aircraft Interiors Expo, exhibition of aircraft interiors, in the French city of Aix-en-Provence), creative designs focused on health, safety and flexible configurations were awarded.
What enchanted me the most was a team that started by designing an electric plane in a size that would facilitate the use of smaller airports. And the design of the aircraft’s interior, signed by Ken Kirtland, from the Georgia Institute of Technology, in which there are seats arranged in different positions, with views through large windows.
Other visionary projects were there at the fair, and all over the world. The anguish is to see so many good ideas —proving that it is possible to think of the citizen, the consumer, with a generous and artistic mind— but hardly see them in practice, because they would imply a smaller profit margin. And, by this logic, it is necessary to mistreat (and not reward) those who give them all this profit.
Does it make sense to you? To me it seems like a big contradiction. Thinking, of course, as part of the 99% of the components of the human being, not as the rest that indulge in our sleepless nights, in the air or on land.
