Wednesday, April 4, 2001
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Wednesday, April 4, 2001 |
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Pilot pay and whining: It's all relative, bubba An anonymous writer took issue with the Delta pilots ongoing action with their company's managerial decisions and if I may, I would like to address this masked phantom writer. Sir, (an assumption on my part) at first glance you seem to make a valid point, and that is that the Delta pilots do indeed make a very handsome salary which allows for a comfortable living. Any further points that you advance in your "peek-a-boo" letter border on the absurd. My name is Buzz Clarke and I have lived in Peachtree City for the past 16 years. I am an air traffic controller at Atlanta Hartsfield and I am acutely aware of the salaries that pilots commandeer. But to advance your opinion that it is wrong for another American to have the same right as you to pursue life liberty and happiness through the avenues agreed upon by society is absurd! You advocate taking away certain rights that we as Americans enjoy just because of the amount of one's salary. Read your own article again. You don't address even one item of contention that the pilots have addressed in their ongoing efforts to negotiate with management. You, sir, sound like a jealous little kid. You want to dictate what you deem to be a reasonable salary for these workers, based on what? Your opinion? Then what? On your salary? Years ago when I first started teaching Sunday school in the Single Men's Class at First Baptist (none of us were single but all of our wives worked somewhere else in the church during this time and we preferred to call ourselves the "Abandoned Men's Class), which was more of a therapy group at times, I started the habit of keeping a prayer list. Extremely useful as a tool for caring about other people. In one case it helped me to completely turn my attitude around toward another worker, from an attitude of wanting to fight with the gentleman to an attitude of caring how he was getting along in life. I even contributed money for him to help pay the hospital bills on his then ailing, now deceased wife. On one Sunday morning, as we shared about updates on people that we had on our prayer list, a pilot among us asked that we keep him in our prayers. It seems that the company he was working for was having troubles and had made the decision to cut everyone's salary by 40 percent! Forty percent? I started to compute what that would do to my budget at home and quickly came to the realization that I would have to sell my house and move somewhere else. Forty percent! Wow, we all sympathized with him over his dilemma, tried to console him and even asked if he was going to need any help in raising funds to keep things afloat. And that's when the hard news hit us, he stated that with the 40 percent cut, it would knock him down to $140,000 a year. We're talking 10 years ago, 140,000 dollars. With a huge grin on my face and putting my arms together in front of me to form a big "T" for "time-out," I said, "Whoa, bubba, wait a minute here, you want me to put you on my prayer list because you're going to get knocked down to making only twice as much as me?! Give me a break!" So you see the immediate problem I had with feeling any empathy for this guy, right? And that's when one of the other members of the class, a high school coach, added that it's all relative, Buzz. No matter what the salary, people find themselves in situations that create hardships in their lives. Some of these hardships we have no control over. Others, we fight and work through with the legal tools available to us all, because that's what this country is all about, my friend. The equal opportunity for us all to pursue what we believe is right and just. And in the end? Because we are a system of supply and demand and we do have to take more into account than just our own opinions, life will go on and one way or another, business will continue. Two things: 1. If you don't have the intestinal fortitude to give your name, stop your whiney little crybaby bellyaching and shut up! 2. Who died and made you king? Democratic republic! Look it up and read. We all have the same rights to pursue justice through the laws provided by our representatives. The pilots have done nothing illegal, so where's the beef? Buzz Clarke Peachtree City
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