Temper Tantrums in the Air May Be Good For All Of Us

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Three times makes it a trend!

Amy Fine wanted to nap on Delta flight 2370, from New York to Palm Beach, Fla., so she laid her head on the tray table. The passenger in front of her wanted to relax with some knitting. She reclined her seat — smacking Fine’s head and sparking an emotional explosion.

The resulting screaming match caused an unscheduled landing in Jacksonville, Fla., the third diversion in nine days caused by passenger fights over shrinking legroom.

My position is that the passengers getting into these fights are doing us all a favor. If this happens a few more times, nobody will ever recline their seat again for fear of causing a flight-diverting temper tantrum. Fear can be a wonderful motivator sometimes.

Of course, there are dynamic effects to be worried about here. If this continues, perhaps airlines will start disabling the recline mechanisms in their seats once and for all. Just not worth the trouble. And once they’ve done that, some bright spark will figure out that they can reduce legroom even more. And then we’ll all be worse off than before. No one will be able to recline and everybody will have their knees jammed into the seat in front of them. Something to look forward to.

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

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