Camila + Haruki

It was only after looking for flight 1440 in both the domestic and international terminals that I finally discovered it by accident in the commuter terminal.  I was walking furiously all over the spaceport when I overheard two women dressed in saris near the baggage claim, hugging their family.  I didn’t understand a single word of their Dravidian tongue except the words flight 1440 and auntie.  I took the escalator upstairs, circled the security check points until I’d taken the SAA to the commuter terminal, and there, for the first time since the TAP had taken siege of America’s international spaceports, I saw an old, broken airport terminal, forty-seven gates worth, the kind passengers used to take before flights began regularly leaving the earth's atmosphere, and this old terminal was populated completely by civilians:  there were businessmen, tons of badly dressed college students in Todai and USC and HKU and Stanford and Oxford (bleh!) and Penn Transnational Uni sweatshirts, sweatpants, and nano-flops, not to mention a whole fleet of Indian, Nepalese, Pakistani, and Arab families all hugging and laughing together.  As a multicultural urban labor intellectual, it literally brought tears to my eyes.  There was not a single hint of Anarchy Punks and their pseudo-Che beards anywhere.  For the first time since the discovery of Bad Boy, I had Union Jack feelings of liberté and hope.