New Airline Restrictions Create Bored Kids

It didn't take long today for some reporters with a very suburban mentality to ask kids and their parents about the horrors of flying without having their iPods and GameBoys and DVD players in their laps. Indeed, HOW COULD an affluent, "connected" kid keep entertained deprived of such devices? Why, some of their flights are more than FIVE HOURS long.

Well, how about a book? Maybe a conversation with Mom and Dad? Maybe people watch or just maybe look around at where you are. Maybe, as the pilot always suggests, "sit back, relax, and enjoy the flight"?

Maybe looking out at the planet passing beneath them or up into the clouds. Heavens? No. Clouds and oceans and unidentifiable landscapes in the haze are for pagans and lost souls, daydreamers, and OUR KIDS are not daydreamers.

Message: the world itself is a boring place (even though, by the way, the terrorists are hop, skip and jumping all around us - glued to THEIR OWN cell phones and laptops, iPods, and DVD players to be used as detonators.

WHAT a bunch of rotten parents we've spawned. It's not like it's the kids' fault. THEY didn't ask for this world. And they didn't learn to roll their eyes and smirk and whine without being surrounded by immature adult (and parental) role models. Parents who have themselves all too often taken complaining to an (ugly) art form.

Travel is a luxury that is not about ignoring your surroundings - or even feeling the need to endure them. Your surroundings, wherever you are, are, if you are alive, a luxury. So show some compassion and some passion for the real world.

Travel doesn't make kids bored.

Parents make bored kids.


"May you live in interesting times." So the saying goes. And may you see your time as interesting.

These are interesting times, so interesting in fact that a conversation about them could last all the way across the Atlantic....