Here’s a scenario for you readers at home: you’re at a restaurant, ready to propose to your long-suffering partner (why do I say long-suffering? Well, he or she is dating you.). You’ve been waiting for the right moment for months, if not years. Now, you’re about to make the move, and who plops down next to you but that most hated of restaurant diners.

Who is it? I’ll give you a hint. They smell bad, are bad for your health and the health of all those around them and they generally are just nuisances to people who have actively avoided their kind all their life.

Unless you’re one of the Ames City Council members thinking this is an anti-smoking column, I think you know who I’m talking about: children. The screaming, smelly things that will interrupt all your plans and make zoo animals look restrained.

We’re nearing Father’s Day, a holiday celebrating those men who have in some way contributed to this population. Personally, I respect the holiday and those men who choose to be fathers.

However, what about those of us who have actively avoided the act of fatherhood? Must we suffer the consequences of their actions?

My answer came to me on a flight in April, when I was seated next to a mother with a two-year-old child. Well, seated next to is relatively misleading. I was assigned the seat adjacent to them, but I had managed to put several feet of distance between us, since the two-year-old was kicking me once a minute, on the minute. Then, all of a sudden, it hit me. It in this case is referring to my solution, not the kid who was giving me a beating reminiscent of Nancy Kerrigan.

The answer? Easy. Non-children sections.

For years before the Ames City Council made them vanish during most hours of the day, restaurants were split into smoking and non-smoking. Back in the day, even airplanes were separated into smoking and non-smoking sections. Hotels are the same way. Who hasn’t gotten stuck in a smoking room at a hotel and come home smelling like a fraternity carpet by the end of the trip?

However, unruly children are surprising;ly similar. They might not give you cancer, but they do give you headaches, which leads to stress, which leads to obesity, and before long, you’ve got heart disease and in essence, children have killed you. Talk about a secondhand health threat. You probably just thought they picked their nose and sneezed on you.

Yet we pretend that parents who can’t take care of their kids somehow benefit from being able to see us in anguish as we’re hit by flying crayons at the Burger Hut. Someday soon, it is my sincere hope that we won’t need to anymore.

It would work easily. When you head into a restaurant, you can just ask the waitress to be seated in the non-child section.

Everyone would benefit from this kind of change. As much as parents like to think they don’t care

what everyone thinks of their children, it’s not true. The lady in the seat next to me on the airplane probably would have killed for the chance to be whisked away to a seat where no one expects to leave unbruised.

Parents will benefit as much as anyone from this new program, since their kids can be as unruly as they want, and they don’t have to bother anyone else. Furthermore, it can help balance the competitive edge. Families simply can’t hope to behave as nicely as adults without children. By putting them among their own kind, they at least have a fighting chance to look like the cultural elite.

They’re also free from the easily corrupting influence of the college crowd. It’s a frequent occurrence that my friends will forget to use their public vocabularies within earshot of children. By giving those children and their families their own section, they’re segregated away from the vulgar influences that Tipper Gore fears most.

Smoking is a disgusting habit. Having children is not a disgusting habit, at least not for most people.

However, having naughty children that just make a mess or run around screaming and kicking strangers is a bad habit. If we can’t have behaved children, maybe we can just isolate them. Call it a time out for bad parenting.

This may seem drastic, but don’t shoot the messenger. This isn’t exactly news. It’s just someone telling it how it is. Children have ruined countless lovely adult nights on the town.

By the way, I’m not saying you’re forced to accept it. But, if you do, just think of the section for children this way, it’s also your best chance to sit in the non-bitter Daily columnist section.

Tim Kearns is a senior in political science from Bellevue, Neb. To the best of his recollection, he was never a child.