Reprinted from Liberty.me
For one evening, I was the most valuable person in the world. About 10 people regarded me this way, in any case. They were 10 among five hundred of my fellow refugees, sleeping on cots under bright fluorescent lights, across from a coffee shop, in Terminal 2 of the Chicago O’Hare airport.
We all had two things in common. We were stranded for the night, and we needed the Internet. I had the magic box, a hotspot I had bought earlier that day, a machine powerful enough to grant 4G like a fairy godmother to these desperate souls.
I realized my value in an instant, after the fellow next to me said: “Do you know how to call Pakistan from the pay phone?” I assured him that there wasn’t one person in the entire Chicago airport who knew how to call Pakistan from a payphone. No one even knows how to use a payphone even to make a local call. There aren’t enough quarters in Chicago to call Pakistan.
He was demoralized. It was his first night in the U.S., a land about which he had dreamed since childhood. He had no credit card. He was making the best of a strange situation, and he genuinely wondered if this is just how Americans do things. I assured him that this whole scene was a bit out of the ordinary.
But I did notice that he had his laptop. I whipped out my hotspot. His face lit up with a look as if to say: “I love America.” In no time, he was on the Pakistani version of Google, the search engine that has united the world.
But as soon as he got online, I noticed my other fellow refugees’ eyes widen. Apparently, there was no free wifi at the airport and the paid version was expensive and complex. I opened up my connection for everyone in my section and people luxuriated in their online lives for hours.
It was a beautiful scene in so many ways. Such diversity, such shared joy in suffering, such determination to push through and triumph over the odds. We were equal in our provisions: we all had one cot, one blanket, one tiny pillow. We got to know each other very quickly. The presumption of friendship was there even before one word was exchanged.
Imagine a California Valley Girl, my Pakistani friend, a Houston cabbie, an older widow, a surfer dude, a middle-age woman from Costa Rica, people of all races and classes, and imagine all of us having a strange slumber party, laughing and talking and telling stories. This was more fun that I could have had at the nicest hotel.
Oh, there was one crabby lady. I was walking around taking videos and smiling. She glared at me and said: “there is nothing worth filming here, nothing worth smiling about. I just flew in from Uganda and I’m very unhappy.”
I said, oh I’m so sorry. Best to you.
I walked away from her and went back to my peeps. About 15 minutes later the crabby lady came over with her smart phone to film the scene. Something had changed. She was smiling and laughing! She said she had changed her mind, and that this whole scene was actually rather interesting and, really, unforgettable. She ended up rallying other people to make the best of the situation.
A real convert!
It was just one of those things. You can be miserable or you can figure out a way to make it work for you. This is what people do. And we all did it this night. It was a spontaneous coming together — altogether 500 people — that no one either desired or anticipated. No one can control nature and the weather just didn’t cooperate with our plans.
The hotels were all full. All the cars were rented. There was no choice but to sleep right at the airport, right in the hallway, right under the lights, inches away from people we’d never met, side by side for 150 yards of space on the floor of an airport.
It was beautiful, peaceful, even joyful. There was no threat of crime, no harassment, no fights, no struggles. Every person there, in his or her own self interest, had just one goal: to get through the night. So, each person, in her or her own self interest, worked out a way to cooperate.
The people who had water shared. We traded off on the use of super scarce electrical outlets, I let others onto my wifi, people with food offered it around, and so on. I swear that I could have walked up to anyone in that place and had a decent and normal conversation.
Politeness was at a premium. To get anywhere you had to squeeze between cots, walking inches away from peoples’ legs and heads and feet. Therefore, social signalling was extremely important. You want to send the message that you are no threat, that you are very respectful. Therefore smiles and small statements of “pardon me” and “excuse me” were whispered throughout the crowd.
It’s very easy to get sentimental about occasions like this, observing how sweet it is that people rise to the occasion. There is a point to that, but it’s not the core point. What really matters is how a scene like this illustrates the capacity of all societies, large and small, to form themselves in an orderly way in the absence of a central plan. All we needed were some tools and some space and we made it all work.
If we took the modern theory of government seriously — that without the leviathan state, we’d all murder each other and loot everything in sight and so we need to be surrounded by goons with guns and surveilled in our every thought — something like this could not have happened. But it did happen and it was a delight.
I was lying there dreaming of something strange. In my dream, I was trying to get some dolphins to stick to the ceiling but they kept falling so I was searching online for a new kind of dolphin that attached itself automatically, but they were very expensive.
Back in real life, suddenly someone from the airport yelled out “Rise and shine!” It was 4:00 a.m. and they needed the hallway for passengers. We all came to and stretched, gathered our things, said warm goodbyes, and off we went on our respective journeys, each of us with a different plan for our very different lives.
Humanity can manage itself.