No doubt, it has to be one of the most frightening experiences, made more so by the recognition there isn't anything you can do about it. That it doesn't happen more often is a miracle of design in itself. That anyone can remain calm in the wind and blast of it is amazing.
I speak, of course, of Donald trump's appalling ascendence in the republican polls.
A week ago, this happened as well. The panel of an Alaska Airlines plane dropped off midair. No warning, no immediate explanation, just a sudden bang and blast of cold air. Who wouldn't scream at that? Well, not the pilot. Note the calm in her voice. Apparently none of the passengers either. All witnesses report that, whatever people might have been feeling as individuals, the immediate effect other than the sound of rushing air was silence.
And while that also precipitates the certainty of doom and collapse, I want to point out what the passengers and flight crew of Flight 1282 out of Portland did not do. They did not panic. They did not put themselves or others in danger by ignoring the dropping air masks or unbuckling their seatbelts in order to move back further from what more than one witness has called "the gaping hole two-thirds the size of a refrigerator."
What they did was, after I'm certain an immediate round of screams and expressions of astonishment, to behave the way people are supposed to in an emergency: they trusted themselves to the professionalism of the trained crew to keep them safe and return them to land. And it happened, exactly the way it should have. If it weren't for the novelty that a panel blew off in view of the passengers it might not have even been reported beyond the local news.
The latter is the way we must react to the news of the former. After acknowledging trump's resurgence as something unprecedented, we need to relax, damp our individual panic, allow that it is happening, and allow the crew, which is us too, to get us through this safely and securely. It's unlikely trump will reach the presidency again, and if he does we will deal with it, but American voters are our own best pilots. We know what we must do and trust ourselves to get us back on the ground without casualty.
