A Boy & His Player’s Navy Cut
“You know, your second-hand smoke is affecting people around you.”
“Hypocrite.”
“Excuse me?”
“Your vehicle is poisoning the atmosphere, rendering it uninhabitable for future generations. Do you hear me whining?”
This little exchange occurred recently outside a fast-food restaurant, and it’s a scenario that’s crept into the lives of those us who choose to smoke. Most of us take it with a grain of salt, stare at our shoes and walk on ashamed, as if we have done something wrong. I have stopped doing this and started fighting back. Why, I think to myself, must I be made the object of shame by some yuppie thirty-something woman whose only agenda seems to be to make herself feel morally superior by parroting the latest fashionable cause? The answer is I shouldn’t be ashamed and I refuse to be.
I am not a rude smoker. I never smoke where it is prohibited, and I always ask for permission to smoke when I am with people I don’t know. I respect a person’s space and property and if they ask me not to smoke in their cars, homes or around them, I don’t. But having said that, I refuse to have my personal behaviour dictated to me by some baby boomer who obviously feels so inadequate about herself she turns her own shame against others for “our own good”.
For the record, yes I smoke. Yes, I know smoking is damaging to my health. Yes, I know the money I pay to smoke lines the pockets of some old rich fart. Yes, thank you my non-smoking superiors, I know all of these things. Yet, I still choose to smoke. I don’t blame the tobacco industry, I don’t blame Hollywood or the media, I blame myself. I am the one who stuck that first cigarette between my lips, lit the match and inhaled. And as far as I remember, nobody was sticking a gun to my temple.
Yet there are some people out there who feel the need to attempt to make choices for me. It doesn’t matter if they badger me or humiliate me because the end (me quitting smoking) justifies the means. Suppose I used the same tactics to combat a similar national health crisis, let’s say obesity.
“You know, every greasy cheeseburger you suck back takes five minutes off your life.”
“Excuse me?”
“Don’t you exercise? Damn, somebody who is as fat as you lives 15% less than the person who eats right and exercises. Come on! This humiliation is for your own good, you know.”
If I actually had said these things to an overweight person, you would think I was the biggest jerk on the planet, and you would be right. While technically what I am saying in that imaginary scenario was true, I don’t say it because I respect that person and their rights and liberties. If they don’t want to eat right and exercise, that is their choice, protected under the Constitution and the common courtesy of a free and just society. So what of me and my right to smoke?
Oh yes, my second hand smoke is killing people like a fascist death squad. I forgot, I’m sorry. I also forgot that virtually all public buildings are smoke-free, most restaurants offer non-smoking sections (and many of them are now smoke-free) so that the non-smoker can go a whole day without ever having to come into contact with us insidious couriers if death and disease. But that apparently isn’t enough. The health-Nazi revolutionary heroes will not be satisfied until our choice whether to smoke or not has been taken away from us, and they don’t ever have to worry about the risk of inhaling a whiff of cigarette smoke while spewing toxic fumes from their SUV’s into the atmosphere.
So let’s get this straight, once and for all. I AM NOT QUITTING SMOKING UNTIL I DECIDE TO, AND NOT A SECOND BEFORE. I know smoking is stupid and dangerous, but it is still my body and what I put into it is my business. And not all the badgering or harassment or moral brow-beating will ever make me quit. Ever.