While it’s not news that a lot of air passengers are nervous these days around “swarthy” types, it’s getting bad when hysterical 12-year-old girls are capable of preventing them from traveling.
The Washington Post reports that, amid various manifestations of brainlessness, some traveling students got into a scrape when a
12-year-old girl started crying and pointing at them [and] “10 people came toward our seats and stared at us in a bad way.”
An airport official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the atmosphere on the plane was so “nasty” that the men, even though they had cleared security and were actually “sweet,” had to be asked to leave the plane because passengers were leading a mutiny.
In the 1600s it wasn’t unusual for women to be burned, drowned or otherwise killed horribly, convicted of beng “witches”, generally on the testimonies of preteen and teenaged girls.
In the 1980s, several lives were ruined under charges of “Satanism”, also on the testimony of hysterical girls.
Now don’t get me wrong — there are surely plenty of times when girls going into hysterics are reacting appropriately to a given situation. However, a blubbering preteen is not in and of itself exactly a reliable marker of … well, of anything except a heightened emotional state of mind.
At some point or another, hopefully, we’ll be able to differentiate genuine cries of alarm from simple wolf-crying.
But for now, before we pick up the torches and have a good old-fashioned necktie party, maybe we’d do well to remember that hysterical girls are not necessarily good sources of accurate information about anyone or anything.
