After a month of busy social media stories and videos about LGBTQ Pride Month and Juneteenth, Alaska Airlines evidently had nothing to say about the Fourth of July. Or Independence Day, if you will. Or just call it the birthday of the United States of America.
The company that serves Alaska and 115 destinations with nearly 1,200 daily flights in the United States, Mexico, Canada and Costa Rica, was stone cold silent on America’s 246th birthday. Nothing on the company blog, Twitter feed, Facebook feed, or Club 49. Oh, and nothing on the employees’ internal web pages. There is not a “Happy Independence Day!” message to be found from the airline that is normally quite on top of various cultural events.
In June, the airline’s blog featured soft stories about female pilot and a female flight attendant getting engaged onboard. The airline festooned its social media accounts and blog with the rainbow and produced documentary videos on the topic. Planes were painted with themes of the rainbow. On June 30, the company took a look back on all its events it had taken part in during Pride month, with this colorful social media post:
One of the jets is a flying a Juneteenth theme, now that it has been made into a federal holiday by President Joe Biden in 2020, giving federal workers 11 days a year of holiday time. A blog post about the company’s decimation to historically black colleges can be read here.
For Pride Month, one lucky jet full of Alaska Airlines passengers en route from San Francisco received a free flight anywhere the company flies in a promotion that featured a video of a prancing and chanting promoters: “You say Gay!”
In 2020, the airline issued Black Lives Matter t-shirts and pins for its employees. BLM has become synonymous with corruption after its founders were accused of misusing millions of dollars in donations.
For nearly two-and-a-half centuries, America has been the beacon to the world for freedom and democracy. While not a perfect nation, the experiment in self-governance continues. This isn’t a holiday one simply forgets.
This year, several prominent celebrities have chosen to publicly boycott the Fourth of July in rebuke to the Supreme Court’s reversal of Roe v. Wade.
Following that court decision, Alaska Airlines publicly promised to provide transportation to any employee who wants an abortion but who is living in a state where such practices are disallowed.
Now, the company appears to have joined with celebrities in dismissing the nation’s birthday, and carrying on as if Monday was not, indeed, the nation’s oldest celebration that unites the people beyond religion, culture and geography.
