Jamie Tobias Neely: Time is now for lactose tolerance

This is my kind of revolution.

It’s serenely calm, it’s zen-blissfully quiet, and everybody keeps their clothes on – more or less.

Last week, as holiday travelers clogged the nation’s airports, breast-feeding moms from Boston to Portland surrounded the Delta ticket counters.

They showed up to protest the actions of Delta contract carrier Freedom Airlines, which on Oct. 13 booted a mom off one of its New England flights for breast-feeding in public.

This merry band of protestors descended on airports carrying signs saying, “Don’t be lactose intolerant” and “Breasts – Not just for selling cars anymore.” They plunked down on airport benches and floors, spreading out diaper bags and blankets and baggies of graham crackers, and simply breast-fed their babies.

It was more fun than watching John and Yoko stage a love-in in their pajamas.

And I’m all for it.

I’ll never figure out Americans’ obsession over boobs.

We rarely bat an eye when fashion-designer-inspired cleavage plunges to new depths, changing the visual landscape everywhere from Catholic basketball arenas to the Communion rail.

But the sight of a breast-feeding mom still gives too many Americans a culturally permissible excuse for wigging out.

Just last year, television personality Barbara Walters told her audience on “The View” that the sight of a breast-feeding airline passenger made her uncomfortable.

I ask you: Have you ever heard Walters sound the least bit nonplussed by the breast-baring fashions on those Oscar-going actresses she frequently interviews?

In our country, unlike most of the rest of the world, we define breasts as sex objects. Yet the use of their elegant, original design – as perfect vessels for the best baby food ever created – leaves us recoiling in disgust.

It’s a nutty view. If Kazakhstan mounts a Borat-like reversal on us, it’ll be the first ridiculous cultural practice the Kazakhs’ target.

And yet we take it in stride.

Not the breast-feeding moms last week.

They’re members of the first generation of American girls to be told, “You can be anything.”

Raised on Title IX and the “you-go-girl” feminism of their parents and teachers, many of them truly grew up believing the revolution was over – and they won.

Sadly, the passage into motherhood remains a rude awakening for many young women. Vestiges of an earlier era’s discrimination still appear in their lives, often in subtle, yet demeaning ways.

Emily Gillette apparently heard it in the voice of a Freedom Airlines flight attendant. Her attorney told the Washington Post that the attendant said, “You need to cover up. You are offending me,” and handed Gillette a blanket.

Gillette was sitting near the window and shielded by her husband. When she declined the blanket, the airline wound up escorting her entire family off the plane.

Of course, it made no sense. Delta has since apologized and expressed its regrets.

And anyone thinking logically has to concede: There’s little as distracting as a wailing infant on a crowded flight. And there’s not a bottle, a pacifier or a teddy bear made that’s as soothing as a mother’s breast.

I vividly remember our daughters’ early days. Bottles were inconvenient, messy and unsanitary. I defy you to figure out an efficient way to make sure they’re sterilized and stored at the correct temperature all through the long airtime and layovers of a cross-country holiday flight.

Breast-feeding, I discovered, is a lot like Spokane: near nature, near perfect.

The American Academy of Pediatrics now agrees. If all American babies were breast-fed their first year, the academy estimates, annual health-care costs would decrease by $3.6 billion.

Last week, as most Americans were pondering Thursday’s annual breast-or-thigh selection, their reverie was interrupted.

A group of today’s young moms, many of them as polished and respectable looking as the 1960s Earth mothers were rumpled, changed the conversation.

Surrounded by sweetly satisfied infants, they quietly demanded we stop discouraging young mothers from breast-feeding. To America’s babies, they urged, nurse on.