Did you see the video of the guy freaking out because of a crying baby on a plane?

I did, and I'll be reliving images from it in my nightmares for years to come.

The man completely lost it on the flight attendants, his co-passengers and anyone else within shouting distance. He screamed and cursed, insisting that the parents shut their kid up, and refused to be calmed. After an airline employee admonished him, saying he was yelling, he screamed in response:

"So is the baby!"

It wasn't so much his reaction to the crying — as over-the-top as it was — as much as it was imagining being that baby's parents.

There's no way they (or anyone else on the plane) could have avoided hearing the diatribe, and I'm certain that there existed a crescendo of grousing on the man's part indicating his increased annoyance with the baby, and them. If there was anything they could have done to stop their child's crying, they would have done it.

Snacks, videos, walks, toys — whatever weapons the kid's parents had, they deployed them.

Eventually, though, they were left there, with a baby who couldn't be pacified and an adult who couldn't be cool about it.

We've all been there.

Our kids have been inconvenient, unreasonable and frustrating, often to us but occasionally to people who did not choose to bring them into the world, and it never feels good.

But the negative reactions seem to have gotten worse lately. In the comments on the video, I saw parents called "breeders" and children called "crotch fruit," nasty characterizations of the adults as selfish and their progeny as entitled monsters.

A shocking number of people seem to have forgotten that they, also, were once children, and that plenty of others were forced to suffer their irritating-but-developmentally-appropriate behaviors. They claim to have had parents who wrestled them into submission at the merest whiff of brattiness or claim to be parents who always adeptly finagled perfect compliance from their kids.

I'm not so sure.

They may think they or their parents were the model of military discipline, but every parent has had moments where they were too tired, distracted or powerless to control every variable. They couldn't stop every tantrum or prepare themselves for every eventuality.

I guarantee that they or their children were also, at times, annoying.

But really, I think, this is a little bit about COVID.

Now, hear me out.

For years, we've been getting gradually less accustomed to inconvenience. We've spent the great majority of three years being in our homes, surrounded in relative comfort, spending time almost exclusively with those to whom we are related or tied in emotional bonds.

Many of us didn't even, for months, have the most basic interactions. At the height of the pandemic, my kids played a game they called "Groceries" where one would fill a shopping bag with items and then yell "Instacart!" before running away.

We're all a little rusty when it comes to dealing with the unexpected and the uncomfortable. We're less patient with crying babies on airplanes, bad drivers on the highway — really, anyone who confronts us with the tiresome reality that we're not alone in the world.

That, considering what we've been through, is natural.

But so are crying babies.

And I hope that as time passes, and we're pushed into close quarters with each other more and more often, that hair trigger will relax a little.

We'll see that inside all the annoying other people on earth are just folks like us — folks who just want to take their kid to see grandma for Easter and who don't want to listen to their baby cry any more than you do.

Then we'll pop on a pair of earbuds, order a stiff drink and relax into the bothersome but magical truth that we're all simply human beings.

Heck, the next time it's my kid who's annoying, I'm buying.

To learn more about Georgia Garvey, visit GeorgiaGarvey.com.

Photo credit: Ben_Kerckx at Pixabay