The scene at Chaminade College Preparatory School led to a flashback of sorts.
I was there last week, in the atrium of Chaminade Hall, speaking to a group of seniors. The lunchroom in the background took me back to my own days at an all-boys Catholic high school in Denver. It was the mid-1980s, and Brother Steve ran the lunchroom at Mullen High School, a Christian Brothers school.
Brother Steve would smoke while he stood behind the lunch line dishing up burgers and fries and whatever was on the menu that day. It’s probably hard for high school students today to even imagine such a reality, as smoking has been banned at most restaurants for much if not all of their lives. But back then it was commonplace, even in a high school cafeteria.
With his thick French accent, Brother Steve would banter while the cigarette dangled precariously from his lips, the ashes growing longer and, occasionally, dropping into a basket of fries. Nobody complained. We picked around the little pieces of burned ash and ate our food. Years later, as smoking bans for restaurants started sweeping through Missouri, I was, for a period of time, opposed to them. I have long had a libertarian streak, and with the number of restaurants that were banning smoking, I argued that the government didn’t need to play a role in something that the market was taking care of on its own.
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Keep in mind: I didn’t smoke. I hated smoke in restaurants, my experience with cigarette ashes in french fries aside. In time, my position adapted. The damage employees would suffer from secondhand smoke, plus the argument that they often didn’t have much of a choice as to where they could get jobs, won me over to the side of public health.
These days, it’s an utter shock to the senses when I occasionally walk into a restaurant or bar or casino that has some sort of exception and has a smoking section. I bring up this topic because on the day I spoke to the students at Chaminade, we all wore masks. The administrators at that private school, like the ones at my children’s public school, have made the decision to protect their children, faculty and employees from the ongoing pandemic by requiring masks in most indoor settings to limit the transmission of the virus.
The pandemic has been going on so long now — in part because not everybody shares the philosophy that was present at Chaminade that day — that wearing a mask, even while speaking for a couple of hours, doesn’t seem all that unusual. We have adapted to the reality of our times in order to protect those around us.
For the past couple of years, I have written thousands of words arguing for mask mandates, at the local and state level, and the words have not been as persuasive as I had hoped. When some people argue for the freedom not to be forced to wear a mask, I think back to the debate over smoking in restaurants and even the long-ago decided debate over wearing seat belts in cars. I understand the instinct — at least from those coming from a sincere libertarian position — to oppose a government intrusion.
But when it comes to public health matters, my view is that when one’s decision to exercise freedom restricts another’s freedom to live, then there is a place for the government to step in and balance those rights. There is further a responsibility for people in a civil society to respect that line where their practice of a certain freedom infringes upon another’s.
Frankly, if it weren’t for the nature of our current political dysfunction, particularly among those elected Republicans who previously supported such a reasonable understanding of freedoms — when they supported government vaccines and smoking bans and seat belt mandates — I think most of us could be like those students and faculty members at Chaminade the other day. Most of them didn’t want to be wearing masks. I know I didn’t. But we did, out of a mutual respect and care for our fellow man and woman.
That’s an ethic I learned long ago, at a similar Catholic high school, taught by men and women who didn’t care what political persuasion their students might grow up to be but did care that they thought for themselves and cared about the people around them.
The ashes in the french fries were just an added bonus.