Stuck in No-Place

An airport hotel and our relationship with where we are

Photo by Marten Bjork on Unsplash

I almost wrote to you about late capitalism and greed, again. One of our delightful corporate giants, United Airlines, kicked my family off a flight without telling us, and we happened to discover this news an hour and a half before a flight out of Newark Airport. In the last 12 hours or so I’ve learned that Newark is United’s biggest hub, and it’s evident who sets a lot of the terms around here. I say ‘here’ because I remain a handful of feet from the airport, at a hotel all day today that United refused to pay for. After an hour or two trying to get someone to help, which was virtually impossible because there is one single, solitary person in United’s employ empowered to help customers in the entirety of this major hub, my family retreated to spend a full day sitting at a hotel, hoping to have better luck tonight.

I could expound, as I have before, on corporations working so wholly and completely to raise their often already huge profit margins that they cut workers, cut pay, squeeze customers and make the experience worse for everyone – everyone except shareholders of course. United made $3.3. billion last year, but that apparently isn't enough. And yet, as I thought of writing to you about this, stuck in the limbo of an airport hotel, I thought about how I’ve written to you about this all before. Every giant corporation in America is motivated by these same pressures of late capitalism: deliver endless growth to shareholders as measured by constant quarterly reports, everything else be damned. So workers get screwed, customers get screwed, and ultimately the fabric of our society slowly disintegrates, all so a few thousand people can stuff more money in Cayman Island accounts as the world burns.

So I’m sitting here, wanting to vent to you (and maybe stuffing a little of that venting in the beginning of this newsletter) and realizing that one weird side effect of this debacle is a day in the most liminal of places, an airport hotel. Here some people in suits are bustling to their very important destinations, while others in sweats pack and unpack their suitcases in the lobby. One family is using this cheaper option, relative to NYC hotels, as a jumping-off point for their New York tourist excursion, and my family is here, eating, watching football, exploring the fitness room, hoping to get on a plane in another 12 hours.

Nearly every holiday season is somewhat about place, for me. I live several hundred miles from where I grew up, and almost every time I come home I try to drive down or walk down the block I grew up on. My parents live a whole three miles away from their old house, so it’s not too hard to swing by the home where I spent my formative years. And each time I make my way through the old neighborhood and by the old house I get a visceral feeling, a sense of groundedness and ease and right-ness. I hope a lot of us typically get a dose of that connection over the holidays. But right now, this year, I get to receive a little dose of the exact opposite, a feeling of floundering in limbo, disconnected from any grounding place and wandering the sterile, uniform, deliberately character-less confines of a big chain hotel.