A good friend of mine (Jeff Miller in Tacoma, Washington) had a wise but depressing rule of thumb. I heard him say it many times:
”Everything cool goes away.”
It’s a simple statement, but it’s also sad and true. The one defining aspect of my life on this planet is that everything that is cool eventually goes away.
I can accept that time marches on, even though I would love it if there were blazing live music, incredible rock ’n’ roll, country, rhythm and blues, and jazz coming out of every bar in town instead of whatever it is that the kids listen to nowadays, which I find uninteresting and dull compared to music of the previous decades. I realize that part of this may lie in the inevitable “Get off my lawn” process of life that happens to everyone as they get older.
But there are thousands of things, things that were cool, things that made life easier for people, things that made you smile, things that were just—groovy parts of American life. So many of these things went away for no other reason than the financial aspirations of uber-rich assholes demanded that something cool, something that actually benefited the working class, the middle class, the average Joe merely got in the way of a group of investors, a board of directors who needed to squeeze enough blood out of the stone of the common folk that they could buy their ninth mansion or their thirteenth yacht. The one defining factor of my life, spent over the last five decades, has been that the richest 1 percent just aren’t satisfied with their greed, their overflowing bank accounts. They have to take away everything cool. They just aren’t satisfied until they’ve taken every last crumb out of our sad little working hands, the ones that built the very infrastructure and society they now exploit.
I have loved Southwest Airlines my entire life. When other airlines were assholes, Southwest was cool. They always let me carry my guitar on board. Their “Group A-B-C” check-in policy allowed you to have a fighting chance to get an aisle seat, or, many times, the exit-row aisle seat. And best of all, their “Our bags fly free” policy was literally the policy that enabled me to carry on with this weird musical career I have carved out for myself. Every single flight I ever took, I had two fifty-pound bags with me, carrying my stage gear and merchandise and clothes. It enabled me to make fly-outs to play festivals, short tours, and weekends, and come home with a little money in my pocket.
Southwest was recently purchased by a new corporate overlord, and a few months ago, they announced they would be changing their seat policy, and would start charging for assigned seats, like all the other airlines. Yesterday, despite Southwest making $62 million last year on extra baggage fees and claiming to their employees that they would never change their free baggage policy, they did it. They’re taking away the free bags. All so their corporate investors can buy fancier SUVs and more expensive private schools for their kids and more extravagant vacations to exotic places that you and I will never be able to visit. They had a system that was working. They had a system that was cool. I and millions of other people LOVED Southwest airlines for exactly this reason—they were cool.
But thanks to corporate greed, the bane of my existence my entire life, Everything cool goes away. It doesn’t have to, but it does. Southwest, you’re going to lose a good thing.
Signed, one of your (previously) most faithful customers.
#southwestairlines #southwest #southwestbaggage #EverythingCoolGoesAway
