Tuesday, February 20, 2007
The Inevitable Consequence of PC hand-holding.
The MCG tried, predictably unsuccessfully, to ban the Mexican wave at the cricket this summer. Apart from the fact that this is absolute lunacy, completely lacking in logic, as Billy Birmingham's Bill Lawry would say, I think the approach the ground authorities used to approach the perceived problem was completely wrong.
Their theory is that during Mexican waves, people throw things up in the air, and due to health and safety laws and the ensuing obligations on the ground authorities to take reasonable steps to prevent injury to patrons etc. they are obliged to stamp out the practice.
Well - when I was a kid I went to the cricket. I have wonderful memories of days in the sun on the Terraces collecting empty beer cans, and especially the tear tabs from those beer cans, and filling a couple of cans with the tear tabs to make an maraca-esque instrument to shake in time with the chant "Hadlee - cha-cha-cha".
Years later, after the advent of the Mexican wave, suddenly beer was being sold in plastic cups and/or plastic bottles. Now I think this is where the ground authorities started going wrong. In the early days of the Mexican wave, beer was still sold in cans, but no one threw beer cans in the air. For one it was a waste of beer, but also no one wanted to be hit by a beer can. Later, late in the day some fools, often the drunken ones, would throw beer cans, and as well as being singled out by the security thugs the people around them usually had a go at them too - no one wanted to be hit on the head by a full or partly full beer can. However, once the beer was sold in plastic bottles EVERYONE though "Woohoo, these empty plastic bottles are just BEGGING to be thrown in the air during a Mexican wave. It's destiny."
I was at the MCG a few years ago in the top deck of the now gone Ponsford Stand. The Mexican wave that day was a thing of beauty. It stopped play. For quite some time. It did 25 laps of the MCG without interruption. The players left the field and Shane Warne came out with a helmet on, ostensibly to try and calm the crowd down but he obviously had the opposite effect and egged them on.
The wave that day was fun. A lot of fun. It was almost as much fun as the cricket and no one near me minded in the least when the play stopped and the players left the field.
But some people threw beer, and pies, and some bottles apparently had urine in them. And some people complained about being hit by projectiles.
And the PC brigade responded by making the containers softer and with no sharp corners, and reducing the alcohol content of the beer etc.
What they SHOULD have done is started selling beer in glass bottles. If you give people at the cricket, in the sun, soft plastic bottles they WILL throw them. Because it's fun. And the more you try to stop them the more they will want to throw them. Take away the plastic bottles however, and give them glass bottles and NO ONE will stand by while some lout nearby tosses a glass bottle in the air. When someone throws a full plastic bottle, most people won't stop them because they'll be seen as a spoil sport or a busy body, but no one would hesitate to step in if they saw someone throw a glass bottle...
Now the PC brigade will say "But if you sell it in glass, people will knock them over and then you will have glass on the ground and little kiddies will cut their feet." Well, firstly, provide bins, and employ the kids you employ to sell beer and ice creams to empty the bins regularly, and people will put the glass bottles in the bins. Secondly, if glass bottle do get knocked over, the kids could use it as a damn good learning experience to be careful and watch where they were putting their feet... I managed to cope as a kid with broken glass, so why can't they?"
The solution is to force people to take responsibility for their actions NOT to try and use the soft kid gloves to make everything 100% safe for them.
