Indoor voices, or just shut the hell up

I really don't have time to be wasting on this, as I am going delirious with sleep deprivation, but this article in today's New York Times was just too damn awesome: "At center of clash, rowdy children in coffee shops" by Jodi Wilgoren.

It's all about one gallant, coffee-shop-operating soul taking a stand against snooty suburban parents and their wailing banshee spwns in the northern Chicago suburbs.

For posting a sign on the door of his business asking that children within actually - get ready - behave themselves, he's earned himself a boycott.

Mr.McCauley, 44, said the protesting parents were "former cheerleaders and beauty queens" who "have a very strong sense of entitlement." In an open letter he handed out at the bakery, he warned of an "epidemic" of antisocial behavior.

"Part of parenting skills is teaching kids they behave differently in a restaurant than they do on the playground," Mr. McCauley said in an interview. "If you send out positive energy, positive energy returns to you. If you send out energy that says I'm the only one that matters, it's going to be a pretty chaotic world."

And so simmers another skirmish between the childless and the child-centered, a culture clash increasingly common in restaurants and other public spaces as a new generation of busy, older, well-off parents ferry little ones with them.

An online petition urging child-free sections in North Carolina restaurants drew hundreds of signers, including Janelle Funk, who wrote, "Whenever a hostess asks me 'smoking or non-smoking?' I respond, 'No kids!'"

That's the best idea I've heard in a long time - child free zones. Now, I'm hesitant to side with the "real family" conservatives on social matters, but seeing as how they constantly contradict themselves, sometimes it's unavoidable: If some guy wants to give his business a more grown up, reserved, quiet ambiance - and not give screeching spawns free run of the place - leave him the hell alone. Can't certain spaces be child-free any more? It's not that strange a concept. I mean, unless of course they're my dad, parents don't drag their kids out to bars, for instance. (And as my mother pointed out, single, middle-aged adults can't sit down on a bench in a playground and read a newspaper without inciting suspicion or worse.) But apparently, times are changing. Whatever happened to heartless capitalism in all its shining, flag-rippling, exclude-whomever-you-please-from-your-private-enterprise glory?

Here in Chicago, parents have denounced Toast, a popular Lincoln Park breakfast spot, as unwelcoming since a note about using inside voices appeared on the menu six months ago. The owner of John's Place, which resembles a kindergarten class at recess in early evening, established a separate "family friendly" room a year ago, only to face parental threats of lawsuits.

Many of the Andersonville mothers who are boycotting Mr. McCauley's bakery also skip story time at Women and Children First, a feminist bookstore, because of the rules: children can be kicked out for standing, talking or sipping drinks. When a retail clerk at the bookstore asked a woman to stop breast-feeding last spring, "the neighborhood set him straight real fast," said Mary Ann Smith, the area's alderwoman.

Yes, because heaven forbid you and your precious little angels might have to acknowledge, for a mere moment, the fact that other people exist. And maybe, just maybe, entertain the notion that those other people who exist have the right not to be bothered.

"The looks I would get when I went in there made me so nervous that I would try to buy the food as fast as I could and get out," said Laura Brauer, 40, who has stopped visiting A Taste of Heaven with her two children. "I think that the mothers who allow their kids to run around and scream, that's wrong, but kids scream and there is nothing you can do about it. What are we supposed to do, not enjoy ourselves at a cafe?" ...

Kim Cavitt recalled having coffee and a cookie one afternoon with her boisterous 2-year-old when "someone came over and said you just need to keep her quiet or you need to leave."

"We left, and we haven't been back since," Ms. Cavitt said. "You go to a coffee shop or a bakery for a rest, to relax, and that you would have to worry the whole time about your child doing something that children do - really what they're saying is they don't welcome children, they want the child to behave like an adult."

Exactly - people go to coffee shops to relax. And it's difficult for the rest of us to do that with your freaking gremlins screaming like howler monkeys and bouncing around wreaking havoc. But you, rich, married, suburbran mother, are the only one who matters, aren't you? Why can't the rest of us just see it your way?

Mr. McCauley said he would rather go out of business than back down. He likens this one small step toward good manners to his personal effort to decrease pollution by hiring only people who live close enough to walk to work.

"I can't change the situation in Iraq, I can't change the situation in New Orleans," he said. "But I can change this little corner of the world."

Rock on, brother. Rock on and rock hard.