Spirit Of Joy, Pride Not Out Of Place
Don’t graduation speakers supply enough merriment to fill a day?
Why do members of every graduating class seem to feel that it isn’t sufficiently entertaining to sit on folded chairs in the sun or rain for several hours, hear about being the hope of the future and making it a better world, and on top of that, listen to all of their names being read out, one after another, some correctly pronounced?
Why do they all feel that the day will soon begin to drag unless they supply some extra fun?
It isn’t Miss Manners who is brooding on this question, but disgruntled members of these same classes, their relatives and an occasional professor or administrator. Every year, after graduations are enlivened by demonstrations of joy and of protest, by duct-taped messages on top of caps and hiked up gowns, by young parents’ displaying their children and older parents’ making displays of themselves by cheering and jockeying to photograph their children, some participants complain that the day has been spoiled.
Graduation is, they point out, an important ceremonial occasion, and not one huge dormitory party. Miss Manners agrees, and tries to listen sympathetically to the specific complaints.
One Gentle Reader sees the display of family ties as a competition:
“At my law school graduation, three female students carried their babies with them when they received their diplomas. One male student brought his 5-year-old daughter on stage with him, wearing her own little mortarboard and purple robe.
“‘I wanted people to know what I went through in law school,’ one mother said afterward. The father expressed regret at neglecting his daughter for three years and desired to do something special with her.
“The consensus among my friends was that the whole thing had been ‘cute,’ but that a crying baby could potentially disrupt the ceremony.
“As one of my less charitably inclined friends put it, ‘We all went through a lot in law school and we all compromised our relationships with friends and family. Should we bring our spouses, parents and pets up on stage with us? Should we wave our ulcer medicine, our Prozac, our therapists’ bills and empty checkbooks at the audience?’
“Graduation is kind of silly - I mean, those hats! - but it seems like the point of it is to publicly recognize the individual accomplishment of the students in completing an academic program. It isn’t a time to argue about whose experiences were tougher. And recognizing the contributions of friends and family comes later, at the reception, at dinner, even on the sidewalk outside the auditorium when you hug your mom and say, ‘Thanks for being there.”’
Well, yes, Miss Manners supposes so. But she finds herself feeling uncharacteristically tolerant about these auxiliary traditions, as they have become - provided they only augment, and do not seriously disrupt, the graduation.
This is not to be taken as license to whoop up other ceremonies. Miss Manners is horrified at the amount of levity that has entered into wedding and funeral ceremonies, where the underlying emotions are, or ought to be, overpoweringly serious.
But at graduations, the predominant emotion is uncomplicated exuberance. If the spirit of joyous relief erupts now and then, it does not seem to Miss Manners to be all that out of place.
What is out of place for the moment is competitiveness. Showing off is surely the order of the day, but those who do not want to shout their cheers or bring children are happily able to show off in their own way.
That one should tolerate others yet be true to oneself is, after all, what those graduation speakers are saying.
The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = Judith Martin United Features Syndicate