The Red Tail Planes
Toward the end of 2018 and into 2019 in New York City during blue sky days, several planes with red tails would catch my attention. I watched them slide above the city, unable to avert my eyes, and it went on for months. Was this more than coincidental? I did what any curious person would do in this situation; I Googled it. The universe answered. People photograph, collect and share tail images. The phrase “red-tail plane” yielded a loyal constituency sharing photos of the tails and planes of the entire airline industry. Each tail is captured and graphically consolidated into a wonderfully thematic digital world. There are a lot of red ones. I found this a good hint to such a strange query, so it kept me thinking.
The desire to share observations, coupled with the capacity to do so on millions of free-to-edge platforms, yields a subset of individuals who jumped from the edge to ask and answer one question. What do I want and need to know? Economists will tell you with descriptions of the differences and links between want and need. They fill volumes of hard textbooks and soft, entertaining paperbacks. It is the choosing “what do I want to know” that flys like those planes with the red tails. I smiled at my little laptop. I’m getting somewhere.
I have a red-tail relationship with the world, and discovering how I, whole communities or countries, choose what they want and need to know may come with a curious smile, but those red-tail planes forced themselves on me. Why are they constantly in my line of sight? I solved my planes with red tails problem as if it was an odor; I went nose blind. I don’t see red-tail planes anymore. I know they are there, and I don’t see them except when they press into my vision because of their failure and fall from the sky. That is when it hit me like a slap in the face.
What if I asked a red-tail question like: How can I assure human well-being? I got ahold of Chris Anderson, author of The Long Tail, to hear about his experience since his work at Wired and his book. I know it is weird to jump from “red tail” to “long tail,” but I just went with the smile embedded in that switch. Chris uses the power law to focus on modern life. I learned how his real-time number-driven vision of the world became future-driven by playing robotics online with his kids. He met another young person online and ended up building a drone factory with him in Tijuana. (Details). All those planes invading my senses and drilling into the curious section of my brain led me to a better place, and it was the novelty of it that got me there.
In these two digital and unlikely queries, I discovered injustice is the opposite of poverty, not wealth. When it threatens well-being, people flee, often in high numbers. The product we draw from the earth’s crust creates these collisions of people and things in its freeness, and then by its price, mass, disruptions, displacements, and distortions. Chris’s experience helped me see the importance of the north and south of the American continents and, in his way, foretold the Xenophobia slapped in our faces like a wall or a plane smashing into the earth. Then I saw it, the long tail of a 2,000-mile journey from San Pedro Sula in northern Honduras to the Mexican border. I don’t know why the red-tail plane brought me to Mexico, but it did. Finally, I found people like Chris Anderson had already figured out a way to prevent bloodshed and make those numbers work by creating something. Sí, se puede my brothers and sisters, Sí, se puede.
