A travel story about finding solidarity in unexpected places

When we become alive to each other a better future seems possible

On a Wednesday in early October, I stood in the TSA line at LaGuardia Airport, anxious. I was in New York for a conference and planned to return home to Colorado on Thursday, but worried that if I waited, I would never get home, so that morning I moved my flight up. My travel coincided with the government shutdown and the subsequent delays due to staffing shortages. We were on day eight, and the unpaid “essential workers” at the airport seemed to share my vibe.

After having my face scanned by a computer and mechanically ushered through a gate, I placed my bags in the trays on the conveyor belt and followed them until they entered the dome of assessment. I stood alongside the metal frame, watching the TSA agent, sitting in his chair, reviewing objects in neon hues of blue, green, pink, and purple. A female agent stood next to him and, in a hushed tone, said, “You have a voice, you need to use it.” He stared straight ahead.

Because Congress didn’t reach a funding agreement, the government shut down on October 1 and remained that way until November 12. It was the longest closure in U.S. history. When a shutdown happens, “essential workers” like the people working at airports, working for the Transportation Security Administration (TSA), and Air Traffic Control (ATC), have to continue showing up to work anyway, unpaid. The Government Employee Fair Treatment Act of 2019 guarantees back pay for federal employees, but in the meantime, they can expect missed paychecks. A week into the shutdown, the Administration was threatening that there would be no back pay for workers during the closure.

Again, his colleague pressed, “God gave you a voice, you’re not going to use it?”

Amidst the promise of no pay, workers had begun calling in sick, resulting in short-staffed airports. Those that were still showing up, like the folks I encountered, were potentially considering a strike.

“Use it.” I wanted to say. But that divide—the one between me, a member of the public, and a federal employee—didn’t feel like mine to cross, and I needed to get home. I needed these people to work, so that I could get on a plane and back to my family, paid for their labor or not.

The longest government shutdown before the one in 2025 was in 2019 and lasted for 35 days. It ended when not enough ATC staff showed up to work. Many predicted this would be how the Congressional impasse would end this time. The conversation I overheard validated my concerns about getting home and made me uneasy about the risks of flying in such a tense environment.

Under conditions like those in a government closure, safety is compromised. TSA agents find, on average, 7,000 guns every year. With increased stress and strained staffing under the realities of the shutdown, attention to detail is likely to wane. Similarly, the primary purpose of ATC is to prevent collisions and organize the flow of air traffic. ATCs have already been complaining about staffing levels before the shutdown, so even a minor labor dispute could have a lasting impact, with pilots flying blind.

With these workers under intense job, personal, and financial stress, everyone’s safety is at risk. And yet, we all carry on, on separate planes.

***

I made it through security, but my flight was late. After the third delay, when the departure time moved from thirty minutes late to forty-five, I decided to get a snack. I walked to the nearest newsstand and grabbed a package of Starburst. There were a couple of people staffing the store, but no cashier stand, only self-checkouts. I feel guilty any time I use self-checkout. I worry that the attendants are watching me as I do their work for them, and we’re both deprived of the social interaction that might smooth over the experience through a shared connection.

Self-checkout is everywhere. As of 2024, 96% of grocery stores offer self-checkout options, with an estimated 10,000 global retailers having installed self-checkout systems. Adoption is expected to more than double by 2030. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, self-checkout and online sales have been the main drivers in the declining number of cashier jobs, and according to Labor Department data, there were about 1.2 million people working as cashiers in 2023, compared to 1.4 million in 2019. The BLS expects the number to fall by another 10% over the next decade.

I smiled at the attendant standing nearby as I approached the computer. I scanned my Starburst and looked at the total when one of the staff, a small, swift man, came toward me and scanned his badge at my computer. For a moment, I was confused. I hadn’t pushed a call button, and there didn’t seem to be any error that would have drawn him over, but then I looked at the screen; an employee discount had been applied to my purchase. It was small, but still, an offering—perhaps even an act of resistance. I looked to him with a wide grin, which he returned on his way to scan his badge for another customer. A corporate man might look at this situation with scorn, as a theft, but considering the full picture, it’s worth asking, “Who is stealing from whom?”

In addition to whittling down an entire category of jobs, under a self-checkout paradigm, customers are now unpaid “workers.” This free consumer labor has executives frothing at the ways they can further cut labor costs by maximizing the self-scan concept, all the while eliminating our opportunities to connect, automating our lives, and surveilling everyone. What made this interaction so meaningful to me was this sweet man’s generosity and courage to go out on a limb and cross social boundaries to insist on creating a connection.

Usually, when I travel, I am on autopilot, just moving through the actions, not paying much attention to the workers making it happen. But in the context of the shutdown, I was piqued, my attention honed on the people responsible for getting me home. It has long been shown that in times of disaster or high stress, pro-social behaviors prevail, and human connection becomes more possible. In the chaos of this travel experience, boundaries between customer and employee were blurred, and we were just humans.

In this situation, on this travel day, it became clear to me how dignity is stolen from all of us. The workers, whether employed by the government or corporations, are forced to labor for free or a low wage, and their customers, separated by years of isolation and transactional relationships, are forced to support the exploitation just to get on a plane. How much patience can the public have for a failing government that pushes policies that serve the 1% and leave the rest of us living our lives in service of the capital that they hoard?

In the U.S., we are separated by social roles, often defined by class, frequently in retail-related experiences. Customer vs. employee. But class is a construct that, if interrogated, could dismantle the barriers between us that serve as the scaffolding for the powerful. As America has become more stratified through infrastructure that prioritizes the individual in the form of cars and single-family homes and the loss of shared spaces, interactions between people of different socio-economic statuses have declined. We are victims of the same overlords, but kept separate. This isolation is the fuel that capitalism feeds on. Some people serve the food, and others eat it. Some people create the trash, and others take it out.

I’ve been on both sides of this divide. I’ve been both the server and the patron—the person paid minimum wage, grateful for the times when the customer shows an interest in my personhood, and the consumer on the other side of the transaction, going through the motions without so much as a nod to the human on the other end. This separation is not new, but it is stark in the current moment, amplified by automation and the concentration of wealth.

Those with more economic power determine the lives of those with less, and this creates a moat. The introduction of machines into our daily lives, like self-checkouts and facial recognition, interrupts the possibility of interacting with others, which makes it less likely that we’ll ever relate, understand one another, and organize. Without opportunities for connection, we remain isolated and unable to act in concert, toward collective benefit. As a result, the influence of those in power gets stronger.

***

Buoyed by the gift of my discounted Starburst, I approached my gate to find that my plane had pulled up and we were about to board. I hustled into line and, once on the plane, I chose a seat near the front between two women. The cabin buzzed with nervous chatter. Passengers were anxious for the plane to take off, and our guide, the Southwest Airlines flight attendant, graciously lightened the mood with a punchy safety demonstration with lines like, “There are 50 ways to leave your lover, but there’s only six ways to leave the airplane.”

I giggled with the passenger on my right, an English woman, now living in Colorado, in her fifties, with two adult kids and a feverish enthusiasm for ABBA music. We chatted about everything from children to comedy to pets. Once we were airborne, she put her headphones on and danced, confined by her seat against the window for over two hours. Towards the end of the flight, she took a break from her party, and we got to chatting again. I learned that she’d just lost her job at a health insurance company. As she shared her experience, the woman on my left chimed in, saying that her daughter, a long-time employee of USAID, had just been forced to lay off 200 people at the organization.

“Horrible...how awful,” the three of us muttered. What else is there to say? Precarity is the norm.

Recently, Amazon announced that it is laying off 30,000 engineers, product managers, and professionals who have built the company. In the same week, Target announced layoffs of 1,800 people. Roughly 4,100 federal workers have been laid off across seven agencies in 2025 under Trump.

Each person who loses their job supports an average of 2.5 people, and every one of them sits at the center of roughly 150 relationships. Over the course of a week, nearly 32,000 people lost their livelihoods because corporations prioritize profit over people. The U.S. has a President who seeks to operate like those corporations, and as a result, the combined impact of Amazon, Target, and government layoffs will touch over 5 million people. These ripples of hardship are felt across the United States. Increasingly, the group of “marginalized” people is expanding to represent everyone but billionaires.

Many say we’re in a New Gilded Age. As of the fall of 2025, America’s richest 10% control 60% of the nation’s wealth. And, because of the nature of exponential growth, billionaires’ wealth is growing at a rapid pace. Consider the difference between a million dollars and a billion dollars; 1 million seconds is 11.5 days, but 1 billion seconds is almost 32 days. As billionaire wealth builds with compound interest, an extreme concentration of capital is created. For example, in 2024, the world’s billionaires gained $2 trillion, a rate three times faster than in 2023.

For everyone else, wages are stagnant, the job market is shrinking, and economic insecurity is the norm. Despite the promise of job creation, most “good jobs” remain out of reach, and the systems meant to support workers are crumbling. And just as in the late-1800s Gilded Age, workers today are fed up. While the first labor unions were established around the turn of the nineteenth century, they gained momentum during the Gilded Age, as the number of unsatisfied workers increased.

Against our current backdrop of inequality, workers are organizing more vehemently than they have in decades. According to the Economic Policy Institute, “Interest in union organizing is surging in the United States. Since 2021, petitions for union elections at the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) have more than doubled. And public support for unions is near 60-year highs—at 70%.” Just as stark inequalities generated energy for labor organizing in the early 1900s, similar dynamics are beginning to agitate today’s workers. In the spring of 2025, REI members rejected company board picks after the union conducted a successful campaign encouraging action. In November, Starbucks Workers United’s ‘Red Cup Rebellion’ enlisted both workers and customers in a strike over unfair labor practices, with 95 stores across 65 cities participating in the strike.

I feel something shifting.

***

Once my flight landed in Denver, I walked with my ABBA-loving seatmate through the concourse until we went our separate ways as I got on the train to baggage claim. It was nearing midnight, and my train car was mostly empty. Flight staff from two different airlines loaded in, closing out their shifts. There was a trio from Southwest and a pair from United. I listened as they chatted about their uniforms. The United staff had been issued new uniforms made by the Brooks Brothers brand. One of them complained of its poor quality, “the shirts wrinkle immediately and start to break down after a few washes. When I complain, they [management] ask me how often I’m cleaning it and if I’m storing it properly.” The conversation shifted to contracts and which airline is more favorable (answer: Southwest). As we approached the final stop, the United flight attendant brought the conversation back to the uniforms, “They are going to have to replace them. They are losing money. We have to order new ones all the time.”

The public acknowledgment that the reason an employer would change something, not because of employees’ feedback, but because they are losing money, felt revealing. It’s not a surprising claim, but the blatant calling out of United Airlines felt new and also illustrated an awareness among everyone in that train car that the jig is up.

A core component of American Exceptionalism—capitalism is showing its ass. Ordinary people are questioning its value. In a recent Gallup poll of 1,100 Americans, when asked, “Do you have a favorable or unfavorable view of capitalism?” 54% voted “favorable.” But 54% is actually a 7-point decline from when Gallup first asked this question in 2010. It’s not that people are suddenly discovering capitalism’s flaws; it’s that this awareness has become common knowledge. But what do we do with this awareness?

In her book, Overheated: How Capitalism Broke the Planet And How We Fight Back, Kate Aronoff clarifies why it feels difficult for all of us to organize more effectively right now; “In positing all of human existence as an endless striving toward market society, neoliberals had to erase not just the possibility of a future but all memory of a past when humans managed to organize themselves in other ways. The kinds of tools needed to navigate out of the climate crisis—things like public ownership, full employment, or even just tough regulations—have receded into memory.”

This is the water we swim in, and yet, the bounded self is an illusion. We shape each other’s experiences of life every day, every minute, every second. My encounters over a travel day reminded me how connected we are and that, if we pay attention and choose to engage with each other, we could change things together. “People and things are alive when we become alive to one another,” Jenny Odell says.

What if we made a practice of acknowledging each other when we’re out in the world? We might reclaim the dignity stolen from us through forced isolation in the service of capital. Instead of moving through the world as individuals, we could nourish our connectedness, and in doing so, create the possibility for a better, more equitable existence for everyone.