My friend's "serious response to a fun post..." (Thanks, mate, for calling the post "fun." I'm truly complimented. I'm not sure about my ability to satirize.)
"In general I've always believed that a person should have the freedom to drink, smoke or use other substances so long as you're not hurting someone else. For example, go out and get drunk, just don't get in a car or get rowdy and punch someone out.
"Unfortunately, many of these practices cannot be kept to the body that indulges.
"I think of my wife who, when she gets in the vicinity of cigarette smoke, gets awful migraines. At that point you might as well have punched my poor girl in the face and she'd have been in equal pain.
"So where does a smoker's freedom end and my wife's begin? How do you balance a smoker's right to smoke versus the health of those around?
"I think of this today because I made the mistake of telling the clerk at the Sunoco how much nicer it was to be in a smoke-free gas station and she growled 'have a nice day' at me. I should have guessed. My joy at her lack of freedom?"
My response:
Mate, you are just awash in schadenfreude! -- gloating over the suffering of nonsmokers in Madison right there in Fast Max's? How could you be so cruel?
Seriously: I get my gas at Wal-Mart (not because they pay fair wages but because it's nearest to home) and I've noticed that, since the enactment of the ordinance, the small space inside the building continues to reek with tobacco smoke.
I smell civil disobedience. (And insubordination toward the employer, if anyone cares about that. I'd like to see a strike myself.)
Perhaps I should say (with a straight face) to the Wal-Mart clerk the same thing that you said at the Sunoco. I suspect that she would accept the remark without knowing it is tongue-in-cheek, because, as a smoker, she doesn't know how loudly stinky cigarette smoke is. It amazes me how unaware smokers are of the stink it creates.
This lucky (in her value system, not mine) soul, however, has not suffered the fate of the other smoking employees: they must go outside now. Yet the employer -- who is party to a corporation that is notorious for its low wages and strategems for employing people "part-time" (35 hours a week and never two consecutive days off) in order to bilk them out of health insurance -- has provided them with two picnic tables and a shelter overhead.
I noticed a friend huddled in that small space with the other miserables, and I happen to know that this lovely woman has recently been stricken with breast cancer. She is a die-hard smoker -- who is neither stupid nor militantly and stridently against a common-sense law (as our letter-writing friends seem to be).
This noble lady happens to be a life-long practitioner of a merciful health-giving profession and knows the dangers of smoking. She is a die-hard because she is addicted. And in this absurd world, we severely punish anyone who is addicted to pot, cocaine, heroin, crystal meth, etc. Not only do we punish the "undesirables" of our society because of addictions to these substances, but we even take the licenses away of medical doctors if they recklessly prescribe suspect substances such as Xanax and Vicodin.
Yet we do this while we are hard-put to keep poison out of the air we breathe -- our infants breathe -- because it is expelled into that air by a minority (well, maybe not here) of curiously excepted and emboldened addicts.
I'm sure my family members, who are probably sick and tired of seeing still another blog-post on the evils of smoking, will glance at this without comment. Thank God, none of them now smoke tobacco, so far as I know. They'd better not, since they have so many smokers in their ancestry who suffered and died of emphysema or lung cancer or both.
But I am so passionate about this because, for one thing, I, who have succeeded at so few things in this world, managed to succeed at escaping from the addiction of smoking. And believe me, I was addicted. I couldn't go twenty waking minutes between cigarettes. I of all people wouldn't have been able to live with smoking
restrictions. I started and stopped and started again, hell though it was even to start as well as to stop.
I am passionate about this because, as a once-upon-a-time counselor of addicts and a recovering addict myself, I invested a lot of energy in trying to help others quit smoking. Most of the quit-smoking work I did was pro bono publico, when I was getting paid very well for my other work. I am as greedy as the next person but I was truly committed to helping people quit smoking.
Yet here in backwater Forlorn River (cf. Lake Wobegon) -- I speak of Madi-Tucky -- Madison, Indiana -- the city and state that I came back to against my will and the city and region that I at last love and will die and be buried in-- these privileged addicts continue to have the temerity to scream their abused lungs out that their rights are being violated. Enough!
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