You can’t help but watch to the end the video of the Swedish student trying to prevent a deportation
It’s rare I watch a video on Facebook to the end. My online attention span has been whittled to a husk by a crowd-pleasing parade of clips of babies doing funny things with peanut butter and dogs being very good boys, and there are only so many seconds of that before you get the idea. But when I clicked on the video of Elin Ersson halting the deportation of an Afghan asylum seeker from Sweden on a flight to Turkey, I watched right until the final moments. Then I watched it again. I found that I had something in my eye.
When a British man, annoyed by the delay to his flight, began to tell Ersson to sit down, that she was frightening children – I know who I would have found more intimidating – I thought I knew how the story would go. Instead, there was a surprise ending. The subsequent debate about her actions has followed the same pattern as it did on the plane. Some passengers were irritated, but others offered their support. The flight attendant got her phone back when the British man took it away. You can hear another man telling her that what she’s doing is right. Towards the end of the clip, a football team at the rear stands up. The kindness makes Ersson cry. The asylum seeker was taken off the plane and Ersson has used the focus on her to ask people to question how we treat refugees. “I think we can do better, especially in a rich country like Sweden,” she said.
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