I guess this conversation has gone on too long, and I'm sure most people are bored with it. I just wanted to point out one thing.

Someone said that in most foreign countries, people eat vegetarian, or have mostly vegetarian diets. This is largely untrue. I believe you can't have travelled much to believe that. The poster mentioned India and China. I myself am Indian, and yes, some groups in India are mostly vegetarian. There are other groups, however, that eat A LOT of meat. My family is from a region that eats a lot of meat. I'm not vegetarian, but from a small age, I never ate much meat or liked it, and my Indian relatives would continually complain. So many vegetarians I meet get so excited that I'm Indian, and then invariably disappointed when I explain that my family is from a region of huge meat eaters.

I lived in China for extended periods of times, and my vegan and/or vegetarian friends had a very hard time. I think perhaps people eat less amounts of meat there at one meal, but they eat all kinds of animals, and generally meat is considered to be very healthy and desirable. Most vegans I knew had to go vegetarian during there time there (which is possible), but most people ended up eating meat accidently at some points. I've had other vegetarian friends travel through Africa, and pretty much had to give up their vegetarian diets. I recently travelled in the Middle East, and even though I'm not vegetarian, felt sickened by the amount of meat I had to eat (there just wasn't much else available, despite the visions of falafel and hummus I had in my head, those aren't native to all the Middle East I found out.) To compound the lack of vegetables, the bird flu has led to a lack of poultry, thus all that was left was beef (which I don't like much, and rarely eat.) But I had to eat, you know? So I choked it down. This has also even happened in various regions of the U.S. I've travelled to (I've had to go to some really backwater regions for some business), and generally nothing vegetarian was available other than a small cup of wilted iceberg lettuce.

Anyway, my love of travel is the main reason why I never went vegetarian. Also, I had some prolonged illness for awhile, and tend to need more protein. But when I hear someone's vegetarian, I say, more power to you!

By the way, I have friends/family who are vegetarian/vegan/omnivore, and I live in a diverse metropolitan area. I've never heard vegetarians/vegans preach at omnivores, nor have I ever heard an omnivore put down a vegetarian (my relatives worried about my lack of meat eating because they were worried I wouldn't get protein, so they would make me eat more lentils, not because they thought it was strange).

This whole argument on this is board is totally new to me. If your meat-eating friends/family put you down, and if your vegetarian friends/family put you down, you really need to find new people to hang out with. I actually had no idea that there was this group of vegetarians/vegans and groups of meat eaters out there that were so annoying about their attitudes until I read these letters. If my vegetarian/vegan friends acted like some of you on this board, yeah, I probably wouldn't like vegetarianism. Then again, if some of my meat-eating friends acted like some of those on this board, maybe I'd be pushed to vegetarianism.

I have to agree with jfruhlinger, I also was puzzled that AA carries the most passengers. I have also had to travel extensively, and have been in the last few years to Europe, East Asia, the Middle East, the Caribbean, and all over the United States. I didn't fly AA once that entire time due to the fact that they were consistently the most expensive. I recently flew AA for the first time since 1996, and that was because they were part of a codeshare with a foreign airline. The flight I was on would have been much more expensive if I'd booked them through AA. So basically, in 10 years, with a lot of travelling, I've flown AA twice. I'd also be interested in hearing how they've managed to stay so popular. Generally, they seem to be expensive and inconvenient.

I have to admit, when I first read the letter, I immediatly thought that she was selfish.

But when I read the letter more carefully, I realized there was some missing information. I grew up in New England too, and generally, during a snowstorm, you didn't ask to go to a friend's house untilt he power had been out 12+ hours. Another thing is, she mentioned that this was the "height of the storm." Does this mean the blizzard was still coming down? It would be incredibly dangerous to drive half an hour in a storm. If a friend called in need, I probably would have told them to stay off the roads while it was snowing, and only come over when weather reports indicated that it was safe to do so. Most bad weather injuries and deaths occur because people are out driving.

This makes me wonder if there isn't some missing information here. The whole scenario just sounds really odd to me, and doesn't quite make sense. It could just be that she wrote the letter to quickly, but I think there's not quite enough information to figure out what's going on.

However, if he had been without power for awhile, the roads were clear, and he wasn't a manipulative jerk, then yeah, she should've allowed him in during a difficult time.