Freedom and coffee go together

Coffee break, Amsterdam

 

     Honest question:
     Have you ever gone to a coffee shop for a cup of coffee?
     I don't mean, have you ever gotten a cup of coffee at a coffee shop. Everybody has. I mean, have you ever thought, "I need coffee!" and then gotten up and gone out to a Starbucks or Intelligensia or whatever and bought a cup?
     Because I haven't. And I love coffee. But coffee is very easy to make. You rinse out the pot — or if there's a cup left from the day before, just heat that up and drink the day-old coffee, a skill I learned from my years at the Northwestern Anthropology Department. I'm doing that now. It's fine. It tastes like coffee.
     As I did that, thinking toward the future, I popped in a filter, add the coffee, the water. For more coffee. Coffee: the one addiction you never have to give up.
     That said, coffee shops are social places. You meet people there, Last week I wanted to talk to a man I might write a profile about, so I asked him to meet me at Bean Bar, a new coffee shop that is now the beating heart of Northbrook. Opened in an old bank, the place is enormous, and every table was filled — fortunately, there's usually room at the high tops way in the back.
     Should not be surprising. The importance of coffee shops as places where people gather is well-chewed over in academia. The American Revolution? Plotted in coffee shops. Karl Marx and Frederich Engels getting together to hatch communism? A coffee shop, Café de la Régence in Paris in August 1844.

    It should not be surprising that totalitarian regimes across the globe and throughout history have banned coffee and coffee shops. King Charles II banned both in 1675, considering such places a challenge to his regal authority. The ban didn't last — coffee proved stronger than kings.
     So it's interesting to see a coffee shop forget this heritage and botch the social aspect as badly as Philz Coffee has. To be honest, I never heard of Philz, nor saw one, to my knowledge. But according to Saturday's story in the Sun-Times, they prided themselves in their, well, pride, and displayed the gay pride flag until recently, when the company abruptly ordered all of them pulled.
     No skin off my nose. I'm fairly impartial about the pride flag — I don't own one or fly one, though consider myself an ally. I only have one flagpole at home, and only fly one flag, Old Glory, bought from W.G.N. Banners. Trying to imagine what might prompt me to fly one, I suppose, were social to clamp down on LGBTQ+ even harder than its doing now, I might fly one, in solidarity, the way I posted a green Islamic banner with a star and crescent as my Facebook profile picture in 2017 when Donald Trump first took office and started banning immigrants from Muslim majority countries.
     The whole thing would be beneath notice were it not for one word Philz CEO Mahesh Sadarangani used in explaining why banners had to be purged from the store.
     "We are working toward creating a more consistent, inclusive experience..."
     "Consistent" is meaningless here — you could also achieve consistency by demanding that all Philz shops display the flag. The giveaway is "inclusive" and by that, he means he wants to encourage MAGA world sorts creeped out the the idea of welcoming gays to nevertheless buy coffee there.

     That is a tactic the intolerant right has been deploying a lot lately, because it works. Tolerance is intolerable, to them, because certain groups are forbidden by their religion, their politics, their inclination. So to include the hated group is to exclude them. Acceptance is prejudice, and Orwell is achieved.

      Never forget the bottomless cup of selfishness that is prejudice: everything is about them, their bias, their fears. So out with the pride flag, and — the theory is — everyone will flock to their coffee shop.

      Except they won't. I don't see MAGA sorts as the type who will pop $5 for a cup of coffee. So Philz is alienating their own clientele while appealing to a group that isn't about to start patronizing them. It's stupid. But prejudice is stupidity in action, ignorance rampant. Of course they have a right to fly whatever flag they want. And potential customers have a right to never go there. 

    In the fall of 2013, Glenbrook North High School students from Glenbrook North's Gay-Straight Alliance, decorating windows in downtown Northbrook, put a pride flag in the window of the Caribou Coffee on Shermer. The owner, aghast, washed it off. I described the result in my blog:

     The Caribou Coffee in Northbrook is radioactive. You can't go in. A dead zone, our own Chernobyl. Oh, the building is there, a block from our house, but it no longer exists as a place a person could walk into and get coffee and a sweet roll and go online.

    The Caribou coffee in Northbrook closed down a few months later, part of a general retrenching by Caribou — dozens of stores closed. Today Caribou has about as many outlets as they did a dozen years ago. A reminder: hatred is not only wrong, it's bad business.