Small potatoes and bigger fish.

Those are the two phrases that came to mind whenever I was asked about the status of my complaint over the last couple of years. When some poor little pee-on has his feelings hurt in south Florida by a cantankerous, ill-tempered manager on a power trip, it’s small potatoes in Washington, D.C. They have much bigger fish to fry than mine. And, though this may come as a surprise, I have to tell you I honestly believe that the owner of a private business in the United States should have the right to decide what does or does not go on in his or her establishment, within reasonable lawful parameters.

Private business owners ought to have the right to refuse to do business with anyone for any reason, no matter how stupid or disgustingly discriminatory that reason may seem to be. If I own a restaurant, I should be the one who decides whether my patrons may or may not smoke inside my establishment. If I don’t want red heads inside my barber shop, that decision should be mine to make, too. Similarly, if I own a movie theater, I should have the same right to dismiss anyone who will not abide by whatever standards of conduct I decide I want upheld in my place of business.

But there are two sides to this coin, and patrons in a free society retain the right to vote with their feet, and with their dollars. If non-smokers don’t like eating in my restaurant because it smells like an ash tray, I must be prepared to accept the loss of revenue (and possible failure of my business) when those consumers opt for a meal at the smoke-free diner across the street. If I haven’t given a haircut all day in my barber shop because people are going across town to the barber who happens to like red hair, that’s my tough luck.

And if I am so depraved as to make an overtly unnecessary show of banishing clean, peaceable, money-spending patrons from my purely hypothetical smelly rat hole of a cinema, then I must be willing to face the preventable reality that those respectable, well-bred customers will never again voluntarily give me their dollars for the opportunity to soil their laundered clothing on the sticky, maggot covered accommodations in the degenerate cesspool I call my purely hypothetical theatre, while stewing amidst the festering, toothless, lice infested, knuckle-dragging, drunkards I so ably attract and who’s rent money I so greedily covet and pocket as my own filthy lucre.

That’s the risk I take in deciding how to mismanage my own private enterprise, and that’s why a boxcar of free passes to my purely hypothetical, stinking little B-movie empire would never be enough to win back the decent clientele to whom I have subjected my brainlessly excessive, hot-headed policies.

But no, that’s not exactly how things are done here in America. Instead, we have calls for laws so invasive as to proscribe even the kinds of popcorn oil that may be used by private concessionaires. So the fact of the matter is that if laws exist to protect people like us from being denied those simple pleasures that everyone else can and does enjoy, I can and will avail myself of those same laws when they are violated at my, or my loved one’s expense.

Even if it takes 26 months to learn that it was all, pretty much, for naught.