The Big Read: We all just want to go home

Earlier this week a man was dragged from a United Airlines flight 3411 between Chicago and Louisville.

He hadn't been causing a ruckus or harassing the flight crew. He wasn't making threats or trying to set his shoelaces on fire. He was an elderly - or as I prefer to think of it these days, late-middle-aged - gentleman of 69 who had been sitting neatly buckled in his seat, perhaps reading some compendium of medical humour, when strangers came to his seat and asked him to disembark because they needed to make room for four of their off-duty flight crew. The law on this matter is pretty clear, but the gentleman did not comply with the law. Instead, he did that which I believe to be morally right: he said no.

• The Big Read: Making the best of a bad jobSomething caught my eye this week. Ever since Andreas Lubitz deliberately flew Germanwings flight 4U9525 into the side of a mountain in the Swiss Alps in 2015 while apparently clinically depressed, authorities have been conducting surveys of the mental health of airline pilots.  

They rough-housed him from the flight, striking his head against an armrest, breaking his spectacles and making him bleed but then - and this is where he begins to elevate to the status of my personal hero - he ran back up the stairs to the plane and tried to make it back down the aisle to his seat.

Video exists of the man being carried from the aircraft as you might carry a bathtub, but even more moving video exists of him clinging to the door between economy and business, like Odysseus lashed to the mast, dazed, distraught, defiant. "Kill me!" he says. "Just kill me!"

• WATCH: Outrage after passenger dragged off overbooked flightUnited Airlines found itself in the middle of a social media storm on Monday, after the US carrier forcibly removed a passenger from a flight due to overbooking. 

These are strong words, but easy to dismiss because they're a little melodramatic. We all know that guy who throws around death metaphors too freely until they lose their impact. But then David Dao says the words that went straight to my heart. "I just want to go home," he says.

Once I was in Johannesburg on a day's filthy business. I had been up since 4am to fly there and endure a grisly meeting in which colleagues were at best obstructionist and my own shortcomings had not gone unnoticed. Traffic had been bad, I had the beginnings of flu, things were not ideal with my girlfriend back home and there was a strong possibility she might at that very moment be setting fire to my clothing. All I wanted was to go home. I fought my way back to the airport and arrived not early but not late either.

• The Big Read: Welcome ghosts come callingIn the pantry under my stairs, on a shelf beneath the WiFi router and beside an enormous jar of preserved lemons that someone sent from Morocco, perhaps under the misapprehension that you can never have too many preserved lemons, there is a time machine. 

When I tried to check in, I was told the flight was full. How could it be full? Look, here's my ticket, booked and confirmed. Behold the clock: I have arrived within the stipulated and contracted period. How can the flight be full? The flight is not full, because I am not yet on it. The flight, she said, is full.

In that moment, I became very small. I became some tiny, barely buoyant object in a storm-sea - an onion, perhaps, or a ruptured tennis ball. I became aware of how deep the ocean was beneath me, how strong the wind, how wild the waters of the world when you are alone and adrift and the universe has removed its mask of civility.

• WATCH: Man gets off flight after alleged racist altercationFlying off the handle on an airplane can cost you – in the case of one man it saw him ferry himself off his flight. 

I wish I had been that gentleman on the United Airlines flight who raged against his weakness in the face of force, who went not gently but in rage, who made the monsters unsheath their claws and reveal themselves for what they are, rather than shuffle acquiescently and head-bowed to his own demise. But I didn't. I did what my upbringing trained me for: I lowered my head and felt sad and sorry for myself and accepted a voucher against the cost of future flights.

Of course that gentleman on the United Airlines flight was going home. You knew that before you heard him say it. Stories are circulating - unconfirmed at the time of writing - that he was a doctor who needed to be in Louisville to conduct some important procedure, but I don't fully believe them, or if they're true, they're irrelevant.

• The Big Read: Notes from the UndergroundHave you ever caught the tube in London around midnight on Saturday when the flower of English adulthood is lurching its way shit-faced home or to some atrocious further revelry? 

No one has ever fought like that to get to their job, or go to war, or even to go on holiday. The Odyssey is about a man trying to return home to his family from Troy, not get there.

If the airlines had actuarial tables for the human heart instead of for margins of profit, they would only bump people going away, not coming back, because what could be crueller, less human than to say to someone on the final run home to where they feel safe and their heart at rest that here's another storm to blow them off course, another whirlpool or capricious whim from the gods and there is nothing that they, puny mortals, can do about it?

In the face of the Goliath of implacable power, David Dao fought back. It was against the law, but he did it anyway. Let's be more like David.