brendan halpin

I went out to see some bands play on Friday night. (Ray Liriano Experience, Muck & the Mires, and The Chelsea Curve, all of whom were absolutely fantastic! These are all Boston bands, but if you have a chance to see any of them in Boston or anywhere else, do not miss it). I did not come home smelling like cigarette smoke.

If you’re younger than, I dunno, 50, this may seem like a weird thing to remark on. Why would you come home smelling like cigarette smoke after seeing bands play?

But I started going to see live music in the 80’s and continued through the early 90’s, and lemme tellya—one of the reasons I stopped in the early 90’s was that I got tired of coming out of clubs with my eyes stinging and my clothes and hair reeking of cigarette smoke. (The other was that I started working as a high school teacher, and seeing bands on a club schedule is very incompatible with being competent in front of teenagers at 7:30 in the morning.)

It was just a given—bars (and, therefore music clubs with bars) were places where people smoked. It was not uncommon to hear people say that they didn’t really smoke except when they were drinking, and that it was some sort of perfect combo. (I suspect this was because we were young and smoking dulled their taste buds enough that they couldn’t fully taste the shitty booze we could all afford, but I don’t really know.)

Anyway, I remember when smoking bans came for bars and restaurants. There was a terrible outcry from bar owners and patrons alike. Every time you opened the newspaper (which was a thing at the time), you’d find an article with bartenders bemoaning their certain doom and bar patrons saying there was no point in coming to a bar if they couldn’t smoke, what about freedom, etc.

Fast forward—banning smoking in bars did not kill bars. So now working in a bar no longer means you’re breathing carcinogenic chemicals for your entire shift. And going to a bar doesn’t mean you need a shower immediately afterward.

And so two things occurred to me about this rather large change in our culture. One is that people’s gloom and doom predictions turned out to be overstated—they equated significant change with catastrophic change, but those aren’t necessarily the same thing.

The other is that when people were writing those articles, they were only interviewing people who were happy with the status quo. There were plenty of people (like me!) who were not going to these places because of the smoke but were harder to find for interviews because we were at home breathing clean air.

In other words, the gloom and doomers didn’t even consider the idea that the then current state of affairs was making some people happy but was shutting other people out entirely. Maybe some people did stop going to bars because they couldn’t smoke there. But it seems like that loss was more than made up for by people who had been staying away from bars and clubs starting to go because it became a less unpleasant experience.

So I guess my point here is that the people who benefit from the status quo shouldn’t have their point of view privileged in conversations about change. They’re scared of big changes, which is a normal human reaction, but a)big change doesn’t necessarily mean change for the worse and byou can’t get any kind of idea of what kind of effects a big change might have unless you make a point to listen to the people who aren’t benefiting from the status quo.