What the HELL is wrong with you?

I had been planning a post about the “leaving process” for days.  How the night before departure - regular life worries begin to creep back in.  How I knew it would not be as restful a sleep as the past days of listening to the rolling waves through our open sliding door.  How the pretty girls at the airport in Cabo are all wearing stretch pants, tossled hair, and no makeup on their sunburned faces (unlike the glitzy bedazzled beachwear they had on when we left Denver).

But then the subject of this post took a related but dramatic change.

The Cabo airport is small.  And on Saturdays (especially during peak seasons like Spring Break) it is a VERY busy place.  After quickly checking in and grabbing lunch (do NOT EVER eat at Sbarro’s after a week of five star meals), we drifted around looking for some chairs to sit in.  There was probably enough room for everyone, but hung-over and selfish Americans were taking up entire rows to lay down.  

Marci wanted some ice tea, so we moseyed over to a healthy walk-up deli at the end of the terminal.  Most venues had really long lines, but this one was small and moving fast.  Marci walked up to grab a tea when another man brushed past her and in front of another customer.  And then it happened.  

The guy who had cut in front of everyone pushed his way further ahead, then told the older man he’d jostled that there was a line and that he should wait his turn.  Now I am not exactly an expert in lines, but nothing seemed to indicate there was any line until customers queued to pay.  The older man said something gruff back to the first guy and then all hell broke loose.  The men started cussing (like you’d hear in a biker bar) and then the first guy began to attempt to provoke the older man into a physical fight.  I’m not even joking.

The first guy, a tall, athletic, professional looking American in his late fifties, pushed right into the other man (as I said older, perhaps in his early seventies - looking more like a retiree) and with a physique nearing 300 pounds. It was surreal. The older man didn’t back down but he clearly didn’t want a fight either.  He was making his own LOUD point with invective not suitable for any Saturday - much less on the eve of Christ’s Resurrection.  And then the first guy leaned down and picked up his three-year-old child.  She, very wide-eyed at the unfolding debacle, was lifted up INTO the fray.

WHAT?!?!?

Once the first guy had seriously intimated the old man he began to walk away.  All the while, f-bombing his new nemesis (and of course all of the hundreds of other passengers in ear shot) and taunting the man for being “so fat”.

Wow.  Just wow. What can you even say to that?

Marci and I retreated to a wall by our gate (of course we had to stand so others could sleep comfortably on ‘their’ row of seats).  We tried to make sense of it.  I mean, these were not pubescent boys dripping testoerone from a every pore and fighting over a tanned goddess.  And one would presume that each had just spent a week in a paradise few in the world are lucky enough to enjoy.  There had to be more to this than a quick encounter with another alpha-male at an airport deli?  Did the first guy lose his wife to a dark-skinned, muscle-bound, Mexican?  Was he diagnosed with terminal personality cancer?  And what about that little girl?  What will she remember?  What did she learn?

We also wondered how the story we witnessed would be re-told?  By both men... Surely they will cast themselves as victim’s defending their honor (or some other crock of crap).  I’ll tell you what happened.  What really happened. Those sophmoric “men” embarrassed themselves, our country, and everyone around them.  What a disgrace.

I was tempted to follow the first man.  At first to jibe him, and ask him if he was proud of himself?  Then to chastise him for acting like that with a child. But finally, Iwanted to try to gently help him see himself through everyone else’s eyes.  But that isn’t how America works in 2018.  We shut up and look the other way.

I’m not sure what to take away.  I can tell you without question I would NEVER act this way or tolerate it in my family.  I feel sorry for both men.  I feel sorriest for that baby girl.  And I also realize that just as they had a choice - so do I.

With that, I commit to choose happiness.  I choose to be kind in dealing with others.  I choose courtesy to others, and others before self.  I choose to relish the good and peaceful experience I just ejoyed and to foster the flame of the “Cabo Peace” as long as I can while heading back into regular life.

I am blessed and I choose to be a blessing to others.

Hallelujah, Christ is Risen.

Amen