Commonwealth Policy Center

There’s a video going around the internet that’s going viral. A man in a Trump T-shirt is being harassed by a woman sitting next to him on an airplane. The woman attributes wrong motives, berates him, and picks a fight. When the stewardess responds to the man’s complaint, the woman asks that the man be moved to another seat. The stewardess tells her that she “doesn’t have that right.” The woman eventually gets escorted off the plane. This short exchange is a fitting example of the state of our civil discourse. Wrong attribution of motives and harassment are incompatible with civil society. We can learn from the woman who was escorted off the plane. There are consequences to our words and behavior. And there are consequences to society that refuses to be civil.