Would You Prefer the Breathing or the Non-Breathing Section? - Granite Grok

Would You Prefer the Breathing or the Non-Breathing Section?

I’m old enough to remember the days when the proprietor of a restaurant got to decide whether smoking would be allowed in his establishment, and how to manage the co-existence of both smokers and non-smokers.  In many cases, a restaurant would be divided into two sections:  Smoking and Non-Smoking.  Upon entering (or making a reservation), a customer would declare his preference, and be seated accordingly.

The issue, of course, was that there have always been two kinds of people:  those who agree with Chris Sununu that merely prolonging life trumps every other consideration; and those who agree with General John Stark that there’s little point in prolonging life if it means giving up the freedom to live that life the way you want to.

Recently, as I sat in a restaurant eating dinner with friends, it occurred to me that it might be a good idea for restaurants to take a page from the old playbook, and set up Breathing and Non-Breathing sections in their dining rooms.

Or they might be called the Free-Breathing and Re-Breathing sections.  Whatever they’re called, people who don’t want to wear masks could be seated in the former, while people who want to wear masks could be seated in the latter.

The issues involved are fundamentally the same as with smoking.  Smokers exhale substances that non-smokers would prefer not to inhale.  Various combinations of physical separation, impermeable barriers, and air filtering technology were used to accommodate both groups.  And people who didn’t think a restaurant was doing a good enough job on either end of the transaction would take their business elsewhere.

And the decision to smoke, or be around smokers, is fundamentally the same as the decision to breathe naturally, or be around other natural breathers.  It’s an assessment of risk, and a balancing of risk against reward.

I’m also old enough to remember when the ability to do these things — assess risk, and balance risk against reward — for oneself was considered the basis of what we used to call adulthood.  Anyone else miss that as much as I do?

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