Are football fans mature enough to be allowed to go wild?
Perhaps you have trouble believing that Miss Manners would be acquainted with the appeal of being in the midst of an exuberant and opinionated crowd that is expressing itself with uninhibited fury one minute and unrestrained glee the next.
Perhaps you have never been to the opera.
As a survivor of many an opera house fracas, where cast substitutions, scores with the effrontery to be younger than the patrons, and a mixture of fans with divided loyalties have been known to whip audiences into frenzies, she could teach the football crowd a thing or two.
Somebody should. They are not behaving at all well. Imagine throwing plastic beer bottles onto the field just because they disagreed with a decision! You don't find opera buffs throwing their plastic champagne glasses onto the stage just because they disagree with an interpretation, do you?
Of course not. Opera house management is smart enough to take these things away from them before they enter the auditorium. It knows better than to arm them with anything more lethal than a rolled up program.
Football management is apparently more easily intimidated. There was some unattractive waffling going on over whether the beer bottles were a symbolic representation of the deep emotional attachment that the throwers have, not only to their own team, but to the rules of the game and to the concept of fairness itself. Or whether they represented beer bottles being thrown at people on the field, as in hey -- don't you realize that could hurt someone?
It took awhile before it was acknowledged that, yes, the throwers realized that. That was why they threw them.
What none of them, fans or management, apparently realizes is that while some venues and occasions appear to allow a great deal of leeway in tolerating manners that would be unacceptable elsewhere -- which naturally serves as a tremendous attraction -- there can be no such thing as a totally etiquette-free zone.
Football has its strict rules, as do all sports, or they wouldn't be recognizable as sports. Music has its rules, sometimes more apparent in the audience than in the performance; anyone who has had the nerve to cough soon discovers that. Even warfare has its rules, deeming certain tactics, weapons and forms of carnage to be beyond its limits.
These do not exist for their own sake, but to allow the activity to continue -- as sports could not if the players freely bashed one another or the fans littered the field, and performances could not if they could not be heard. That the lack of rules might put an end to warfare is not exactly threatening, Miss Manners acknowledges, although it is in the case of bans on nuclear weapons.
The difficulty, naturally, is in enforcement. Policing can do only so much, especially in large, volatile crowds. It is also necessary for the participants themselves to accept the fact that manners can operate at different levels for different occasions, rather than their being either on or off. There is no off button.
How does one do that?
Historically and presently, music manners have been forcibly taught to audiences by highly respected, even venerated, musicians who made clear their contempt for out-of-bounds behavior and refused to play for badly behaved audiences.
It's called using role models. Does the sports world, populated by nothing but role models, think the only people theirs can impress are little kids?
DEAR MISS MANNERS: What is a practical and "proper" way for a doctor to respond when a patient, or in my case, a parent of a patient, initiates a cell phone call, responds to a ring, or continues a cell phone conversation while I'm in the exam room? I'm sure neither physical violence nor a lecture on manners is in order.
GENTLE READER: The last Miss Manners checked, the Hippocratic Oath precluded doctors' using violence to teach their patients manners.
So, for that matter, does the Etiquatic oath.
What you can do is stop the examination and use the time to take or return your own telephone calls, something Miss Manners trusts you would never do while seeing a polite patient. If you are challenged, you should reply that you are waiting until the patient or parent was free to pay attention to the examination.
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