I started out writing this post with the intention of talking about the smoking ban in Alexandria Virginia(Alexandria tobacco users are unhappy with new law).
For(the two) people used to reading my crappy blogging style this will more likely than not be a departure,I imagine.
I will see if I can't manage to keep this sort of thing up but some part of me doubts that I can do it.
When it all began it seemed so reasonable.No smoking on long flights and smokers said "Oh o.k. sure I can understand not inconviencing the non smokers,surely not everyone enjoys the smell of smoke."
The as everyone can see it snowballed.
And because most smokers are laid back people we just let the anti's take more and more away from us until we had nothing.
And now they want to take everything not just from us, but from other people who had the targets painted on their backs by the healthists.
No one is safe from these loons,no one who drinks or uses sugar or salt or is a child.
I have never seen so many people so willing to trample on the freedoms of a select few,and this is not at all unfamiliar,it's been tried before.
What started this is something I never thought would,an ancient by most thoughts article from the Wall Street Journal.
There is a part of me that imagines that most of us have read this,hell most people 40 or some a bit younger like myself have lived it.
I remember the laws being passed and them forcing us outside to smoke at work,in those days you could still smoke indoors in a separate room away from where anyone else could see you.
Of course I can remember smoking in shopping malls when I was a teenager,but right about the time I turned 10 there was a bit of EPA magical number crunching that made secondhand smoke
a"real danger"
It wasn't too many years later when the groups lobbied the health departments to ban smoking in bars and restaurants for the health of the workers.
Eventually they won on that with their lies too.
God the idea of writing the history of all of it is beyond my scope so I'm going to focus on what it was like being forced out or my work ten years ago.
It started being ten feet away,then after a year or so twenty.
At that point all smokers were lazy because they were away when they were needed.
After a few more years they told us breaks were only if business needs allowed us to have them and now we had to stand out in the parking lot by our cars or sit in our cars to smoke(oddly at that point i was riding a motorcycle to work) so I found that beyond funny.
(I guess I should day they can't enforce this rule so it's a moot point,people just walk around the corner,away from where people can see them.)
The thing that bothers me most is that there was a point where we were still in society,still a part of it and that changed in the last 30 or more years that I have lived.
The places welcome to me and members of my family have dwindled so much that now we just stay home.
Even if we could afford to go out and eat somewhere or go out dancing or go to a club why would we?
Our club,where we fit is outside of those places,outside where the music plays and outside of where the drinks are being poured.
The ostracism of an entire group of people seems beyond the scope of what society could accomplish but they accomplished their shunning quite effectively.
And now I see them starting to beat up on the overweight and the drinkers .
Don't we need to band together,all of us?
Smokers,snussers,chewers,cigar smokers,pipe smokers people who use snuff?
And add to that group people who drink,people who like salt and sugar and people who just might not be a perfect size zero or three or five or ten?
Isn't it time to say hell no ?
All any of us really want is to be left alone.
I don't know if we can go back to just being people again but let us have our separate places,our separate lives and live them so we are in the end happy,we will take responsibility for ourselves if you all just go away.
