Smoking, Smokers

My father smoked cigars and later a pipe;  my mother smoked Lucky Strikes -- lots of them.  When I was a boy, the air in our house was a blue-gray haze. I believe that my mother smoked throughout her four pregnancies. Why shouldn't she have?  The tobacco industry advertised that smoking was good for you.  There wasn't "a cough in a carload."  Doctors smoked Camels and were paid to testify that smoking was harmless all the while corporate leaders knew about but suppressed evidence of fetal damage, heart disease, and lung cancer.  Cigarettes were the perfect product:  "make it for a penny, sell it for a dollar, and it's addictive as hell."

I tried to smoke -- I stole my mother's cigarettes and lit up in the cellar.  It was horrible, nasty, and disgusting.  I couldn't do it.

Smoking was omnipresent in those days.  Foul odors and brimful ashtrays were the norm.  In my first year in college, I was assigned a roommate who smoked constantly.  I hated it, but there was no recourse.  Professors smoked while lecturing and students, naturally, followed suit, so classrooms were distractingly polluted.  Smokers had everything their way and dissenters were a prissy minority.  At dinner parties, guests would bring their cigarettes to the table.  Is there anything more odious than a tray of smelly ashes at the festive board?

In the 70s, I got up the courage to place a modest, hesitant sign on our front door:  "Please no tobacco."  But sometimes guests would smoke anyway, unwilling to believe  that a hospitable person would try to restrict a commonly accepted right.  I was regularly outraged by the insensitivity of my friends.

But little by little, customs and laws began to change.  It took lots of hard work by anti-smoking lobbyists and organizers.  Many lawsuits. Now it's hard to remember that until recently airplanes had smoking and non-smoking sections -- although in fact, the air stunk no matter where you sat.  As did restaurants, buses, arenas, theaters, offices.

Nowadays, no one that I know would dream of smoking indoors; certainly not in someone's home.  Cigarette smoking has become a shameful addiction.  The change in attitude toward tobacco has been one of the few unequivocal social betterments of my lifetime  -- but too late for those dear friends and family members who died far too painfully and far too early.

And what about those knots of poor proud deluded newly-addicted teen-agers?  The increase in tobacco use world-wide?  And those fat pompous corporate execs, still lying through their shiny teeth, who deserve to be strung up by their thumbs?            

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[Otis Jefferson Brown]

At the risk of being off-topic: Obama-Biden '08!