To my fellow airline passengers, a manifesto

Bravo to Tony Fierro, who confronted the American Airlines bully (aka flight attendant) who hassled a woman with a baby on Flight 591, from San Francisco to Dallas-Fort Worth last month. Just when I was beginning to be worried about the notable absence of passenger solidarity in support of David Dao on his United Airlines flight, along comes Sir Galahad to renew my faith that chivalry is not dead.

Unfortunately, that courageous traveler seems to be the exception. Witness the passenger abuse aboard a Delta flight from Hawaii last month. The viral video shows a husband/father being hassled by both cabin crew and security officers. He has to deal with these authorities on his own, with no passengers coming to his aid.

We have got to stop accepting airline mistreatment as the norm; grin and bear it will lose your front teeth, as Dao found out.

Modern airline travel has become so stressful that the flying public seems to have adopted a survival strategy to get safely from departure to arrival. I call it the three-wise-monkeys coping strategy: See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil.

Whenever bad stuff happens around our flight, we tend to hunker down, hoping it will go away — or at least that we won’t get sucked into the drama. “Don’t get involved” has become a modern mantra for urban civilization.

Perhaps this is the “Kitty Genovese effect,” named for the young woman murdered outdoors in New York in 1964, and the conflicting claims over whether people came to her aid.

When Dao was assaulted, there was no Tony leaping out of his seat to come to the rescue of a fellow passenger being abused by “authorities.” Why not?

Are we all suffering from anomie, the term used by French sociologist Emile Durkheim to describe a disconnectedness in modern society, a social and moral malaise, a kind of alienation that disrupts the human connection of solidarity between the individual and the group?

Many of us have participated recently in anti-Trump rallies around the country as a way of expressing our solidarity with other citizens and neighbors against common threats to American values. Can we now harness some of that collective energy next time we take a flight and be prepared to stick up for one another in the face of abusive treatment by an airline?

I’m not talking about erupting into brawls over canceled flights, as we saw with Spirit Airlines passengers this week in Fort Lauderdale. What I have in mind is more like the “kiss of peace,” a moment in the liturgy of the Catholic Mass when congregants all shake hands with one another.

We should initiate a “kiss of ease” on our next flight, a handshake of solidarity with our fellow passengers, a mutual assurance that we can sit back and relax because, no matter what happens, we are among buddies.

Let’s christen this handshake “gimme a Tony.”

Arthur McCaffrey is a retired Harvard University psychologist who writes frequently about child abuse. This piece originally appeared in The (Louisville) Courier-Journal.