LOST

I was looking through some email today, actually, I was trying to make some room in my mailbox. I found a lot of the letters that were written to me last summer about how airline bankruptcy or the threat of it, had effected you. It made me think of another television show: LOST. I have never watched this show but ABC does a great job of promoting it so I have seen the commercials. I understand the premise to be the survivors of an airline crash are stranded on some bizarre, almost haunted island?

In my version of LOST, the survivors are stranded in this country. They were victims of airline bankruptcy, victims of airline cut-backs and victims of a society that simply did not give a damn! On my LOST, the stars are the airline crews that kept flying, the retirees that live on about 20% of what they were promised. My stars suffer horribly, they lose spouses to divorce, illness and even suicide. Marriages of 25 and 30 years simply can not stand the pressure.

We have episodes where all the survivors lobby Congress, they make passionate, honest pleas. They explain the lack of fairness, the lack of Americanism, they explain discrimination. These "survivors" question a mandatory retirement coupled with a penalty for retiring? Our heroes take their ever dwindling incomes to fight for the same rights being granted pilots from other countries. Some shows are shot in India, Europe and Asia anywhere we find our survivors finally working again to support families, pay for medical insurance that used to be provided.

In the Bigjetcity production of LOST, the evil comes from airline executives who line their pockets with ill-gotten bonuses, the evil is in the press who turn a blind eye because there are not enough of us, because we still have a retirement even if it is pennies on our dollar.

I am not sure how the ABC version of LOST is doing but I know there are enough stories out there, enough heroes, enough warriors to keep the Bigjetcity version on the air for a very long time.

An emmy to all of you, I only wish it had been pretend and not reality! Truth is once again stranger than fiction.