Die Hard in Burley T'backer Country

TEXT See "Supporting Smokers"

What is it with this Donovan Estridge and the no-smoking ordinance? The Madison City Council passed the ordinance some time back and it went into effect two days ago. Mr. Estridge has come up with at least three stories that I can recall since then featuring people who are outraged about it. Not only has he featured such people but he has in fact made them into heroes. He has, to the best of my knowledge, ignored or brushed off those who approve of the ordinance: their comments are buried in or excluded from each story.

All right, forgive my rudeness, but Donovan's Heroes (Was there a movie with that title?) who champion the cause of smokers look more like fools to me. Tobacco smoke kills, and it kills innocent people who do not willingly ingest it into their lungs as well as those who foolishly do. Having non-smoking sections in restaurants is like having non-chlorinated sections of swimming pools.

"Chutzpah," a Yiddish word, has been defined as that quality in a person who kills his parents and then at his murder trial, begs for mercy because he is an orphan.
I am nauseated by this absurd tirade of tobacco addicts -- who know damned well that smoking is bad for everybody, including them, and who have tried to quit time after time and rue the fact they ever started -- and who ought to be ashamed of having their photographs on the front page of the paper -- that their "constitutional rights" have been taken away, that the people who have promoted these laws are "Communists," and such moronic swill. When they give two seconds' thought to their plight, they know they are hooked on tobacco and must obey their habit. And therefore they have about as much "freedom" as prisoners at Guantanamo -- yet they brazen out their diatribe that their "freedom" has been taken away -- and a reporter prints their inanities and -- it sure as hell appears to me -- glorifies them.

Of course smokers have constitutional rights. They just don't include spewing poison into the air that others breathe. Endangering others' health is against the common law, just as physical assault and reckless driving are. There is nothing in the constitution guaranteeing any group of citizens the right to hurt other citizens. It is an absurdity that we Americans fill our prisons with addicts to practically every other drug in existence but tobacco; but smokers -- at least in this ignorant backwater -- rail about not only their "rights" to enslave and injure themselves but also to injure others in public places.

Has anyone considered the child abuse -- endangerment -- involved in smoking in an enclosed car in which their children must be passengers? The child must inhale the addictive substance. We would be outraged if parents put cocaine or heroin in children's baby bottles, but say nothing when we see parents smoking in their cars with small children. That "right" has not been taken away by the ordinance. Why not? Why do we let tobacco rule? Why do we put up with inanity and insanity over an issue that is so clear-cut?