Keep Your Head; Apply Restraint
Dear Miss Manners: About a week after the last increase in airport security, my roommate was detained by airport staff because her luggage contained an answering machine and a few tools - and perhaps because she is young, black and was casually dressed on a weekday morning flight. She was kept in a back room, alone with two men who made subtly sexist remarks, searched and confiscated her luggage and finally escorted her off airport property because she had become “belligerent.”
As the incidence of bombings and similar violence increases, I understand that the police need to be more vigilant and suspicious. However, do they not need to conduct these investigations with politeness and care? If they apply the same condescension, sexism and presumption of criminality as they search increasing numbers of innocent citizens, I fear that many more normally polite travelers will become “belligerent.”
Do you have any suggestions?
Gentle Reader: Miss Manners suggests that you amend your understandably angry suggestion that guards treat innocent people politely. She does not believe that even the guards you describe would quarrel with that.
The difficulty they have - and the requirement that Miss Manners would demand - is in being polite to people they regard, for whatever reason, as probably guilty. Perhaps the greatest emotional problem in law enforcement is for people who should bring suspicion, vigilance and passion to fighting crime to understand that they must nevertheless treat their suspects with restraint - even beyond the requirements of the law.
Her suggestion for those who have been treated otherwise is not to fight back on the spot, which indeed produces the appearance of belligerence, but to pursue their complaints to higher authorities afterwards. But to do so effectively, they too must observe the restraints of politeness no matter how strong their complaints.
So the problem is the same for both: To allow deep moral indignation to fuel the pursuit of justice without allowing it to break down into the manners of thugs.
Dear Miss Manners: Enclosed with a wedding invitation was a reply card with spaces for me to mark whether I would prefer to be served beef or chicken at the dinner. I am a vegetarian. I would prefer that they neither kill a chicken nor go to the expense of providing prime roast beef, since I will not eat either entree.
Is it polite to write on the card that I am a vegetarian? If I return the card with neither entree checked, I’m quite sure that I will be served meat.
Gentle Reader: The intention behind the meal choice card is so hospitable that Miss Manners hates to have to point out what a mistake it is. So thank you for saving her the trouble.
You cannot run a private party as if you were a public accommodation. Adding a vegetarian category to the choice might help you, but there are dozens of other philosophical, religious and medical restrictions guests might have. Not to mention picky little personal preferences.
Sensible hosts just provide a wide range of foods and hope that polite guests will take what they want and leave the rest. You can indicate your intention of doing this by writing, “No, thank you (vegetarian).” (The asides about killing chickens and investing in beef are intended to be kept between you and Miss Manners, she trusts.)
It will not be lost on you that this restrained reply may encourage them to order you a special meal.
xxxx
The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = Judith Martin United Features Syndicate