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The U.S. Department of Transportation, in an effort to restore “courtesy and class” to air travel, has launched a new initiative designed to inspire Americans to be more dignified as we journey to our holiday destinations.
The tagline is “The golden age of travel starts with you.”
According to a video on the DOT website, the new “civility campaign” harkens back to the time when “flying was a bastion of civility” and “we respected the dignity of air travel, and the men and women who made the dream possible.”
“But today .... ” the narrator intones, and the music turns ominous as we’re shown clips of passengers engaging in all sorts of boorish behavior, from bare feet on the inflight video screen, to passengers biting each other and throwing punches, dressed in casual attire that, in some cases, looks alarmingly like pajamas.
U.S. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy then appears, urging, “Let’s bring civility and manners back.” He suggests things we should do to be better: assist pregnant women and the elderly in placing their bags in the overhead compartments, dress with respect, keep control of our children, say “thank you” to flight attendants and pilots. “Are you saying ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ in general?” he asks. “The golden age of travel begins with you.”
It’s a campaign that is long overdue, and unfortunately is unlikely to have any effect, because the people most likely to agree with Duffy are the ones already dressing and behaving with dignity. The ones throwing punches, pounding angrily on check-in counters and yelling “I’m allowed to put my seat back” at fellow passengers are not likely to have an “aha” moment because of the campaign.
A reporter in Boston went to Logan International Airport to ask travelers what they thought of the idea. “Ridiculous,” one said. Another pointed out that comfort, not formality, is what most people are thinking about when they’re dressing for a six-hour flight in cramped quarters. But in Grand Rapids, Michigan, one traveler told a reporter that restaurants have minimum standards for service, so why not airlines and airports?
That’s a fair point, but Duffy and the DOT are up against an increasingly slovenly culture in which many people think it’s perfectly fine to wear athletic clothes to worship services and in the U.S. Senate.
They’re also up against a flying public that is fed up with cost-cutting measures of airlines. As one person wrote on X, “’I’m not wearing a nice fit so I can sleep in the terminal for three hours while my flight is delayed just to get stuffed into a 17 inch-wide seat.”
Others have pointed out that while people might have dressed nicer in the golden age of flying, which CNN dates as roughly the 1950s to the 1970s, air travel was much more expensive then. The experience of well-dressed travelers eating five-star meals on board, while drinking Champagne served by flight attendants who looked like movie stars wasn’t an option for much of the population.
As Marisa Garcia, writing for Travel and Leisure, put it, “Deregulated, democratized, affordable air travel is very different from the glamorous air travel of those far-gone days, but at least more of us get the pleasure of complaining about it.”
But give Duffy credit for starting the conversation, which is what the Department of Transportation says the campaign is designed to do. More pleases and thank-yous, less biting, on domestic flights should be something we can all rally around.
Thanksgiving with William F. Buckley Jr.
William F. Buckley Jr. would have turned 100 years old on Monday, and were he still with us, he’d probably be gearing up for his preferred Thanksgiving feast: roasted pheasant with chestnut cornbread stuffing.
We know this because the late conservative icon was also a cultural icon, so much so that Esquire magazine published a feature in 1984 sharing WFB’s Thanksgiving recipes.
The pheasant recipe was pleasingly simple: “Smear the pheasants with butter, salt, and pepper. Place the birds in a shallow roasting pan. Spoon on a mixture of one cup currant jelly, one cup orange juice, one-half cup lemon juice. ... Roast about fifty minutes at 400 degrees, basting often.” (The dressing recipe was a bit more complicated, and involved a Pepperidge Farm prepared mix, and so was definitely not MAHA friendly.)
It’s hard to imagine a major magazine doing a similar feature on any leading figures in conservatism today, unless that magazine was, say, National Review.
But as George H. Nash reminds us, in a Hillsdale College speech adaptation published Monday by the magazine Buckley founded, Buckley was welcome in diverse parlors of thought, to include the general-audience comedy show “Laugh In.”
“It was one of his most dazzling performances,” Nash noted, saying that an interviewer asked Buckley why he is always seated when he appears on TV. “Does this mean you can’t think on your feet?” the man asked.
“Buckley paused for a moment and then answered: It’s very, very hard to stand up carrying the weight of what I know.”
He had a sharp wit and a formidable intellect, to be sure, but Buckley could also be sentimental when it came to his country, and the gifts that Americans enjoy. In a speech he gave in November 1988, Buckley dressed us all down for becoming, as he put it, “basket cases of ingratitude.” Those words are worth remembering on the week of Thanksgiving.
“We are left with the numbing, benumbing thought that we owe nothing to Plato and Aristotle, nothing to the prophets who wrote the Bible, nothing to the generations who fought for freedoms activated by the Bill of Rights. ... We cannot hope to repay in kind what Socrates gave us, but to live without any sense of obligation to those who made possible lives as tolerable as ours, within the frame of the human predicament God imposed on us — without any sense of gratitude to our parents, who suffered to raise us; to our teachers, who labored to teach us; to the scientists, who prolonged the lives of our children when disease struck them down — is spiritually atrophying," he said.
So as we’re giving thanks, Buckley suggests we be thankful for “the great wellsprings of human talent and concern” that gave us our parents, William Shakespeare, Abraham Lincoln, Mark Twain and Johann Sebastian Bach, to name such a few.
“We need a rebirth of gratitude for those who have cared for us, living and, mostly, dead. The high moments of our way of life are their gifts to us.”
Recommended reading
Samuel J. Abrams offers real-life examples of what gratitude looks like, using the example of Alex Karp, co-founder and CEO of the software firm Palantir Technologies.
“Gratitude ties us to the people who made our lives possible and creates obligations not only backward, to those who helped us, but forward, to those who will someday need our care. In a culture dominated by the myth of the self-made life, this truth feels almost countercultural: we rise because someone cared.”
How one tech CEO learned that gratitude is not only a personal virtue, but a civic one
About 130 million Americans are caregivers of either children or adults, and increasingly, both. When policymakers think about how to help them, they often think in silos, write Jason Resendez and Elliot Haspel, arguing that it’s better to see them as connected.
“Research silos create policy silos. Child care and elder care researchers rarely interact, despite studying the same families at different life stages. Those 16 million sandwich-generation caregivers represent natural connection points for unified policy, yet we rarely study their integrated experiences.”
In an age of silos, America’s caregivers need connected solutions
The ugly chants that have been surfacing at BYU games merit a stronger response, argues CD Cunningham.
“Each of these universities tell us that the chants don’t represent who they are. That’s believable. But the offenses keep happening, meaning some action should be taken to bring change. University of Arizona, where the chant was recorded in 2006, had still not fixed the problem in 2025.”
What more can universities do to prevent explicit chants at BYU games?
End notes
If you’re a guest at someone else’s Thanksgiving table and you’re not being asked to pay, be thankful, because this is another way in which our culture is becoming more coarse.
A Washington Post columnist recently addressed the matter of a person who charged her Thanksgiving guests $10 — and put out a tip jar, too.
While some people argue that it’s OK for friends to share the cost of a meal at a “Friendsgiving” gathering, it’s a bit jarring when the request comes from a relative, as in the case Michelle Singletary wrote about.
Thankfully, the columnist came down on the side of civility and basic good manners, advising readers: “There is no financial justification for a cover charge for Thanksgiving dinner or any other celebration.” (For the record, that includes weddings, another worrisome trend.)