What typical reaction might the following passage have elicited had it been written four or five decades ago? And how does that reaction compare to the one it would generally elicit today?
I do not feel that people who have quit smoking nor have spent money on smoking-cessation products and services should be congratulated for their tasks. Offering up a positive retort only serves to reinforce the idea, ultimately, that it is bad to smoke. The simple congratulations – even if stated in a meaningless fashion, even if you really don’t care, even if it’s awkward to say nothing – means that one supports the status quo.
This goes hand in hand with why I hate (yes, hate) the “smoker acceptance lite” idea, which suggests that smoking cessation and the acceptance of smokers as people can co-exist. When people purposefully quit smoking, they’re saying that they are more willing to support society’s limited views on smoking and smokers than fight for broadening those views and definitions. When those same people later tack on “support” for acceptance of smokers, it feels hypocritical.
Pretty fruit-loops, eh? When widespread concern about the health risks of smoking first arose, the data were clear and many people paid heed, but the tabacky companies — and with them, a small but significant pool of obstinate and deluded smokers — loudly ran their yap-gaps about the whole thing being a scam. Today, only the truly insane or depraved would claim that smoking is anything but pestilential. Yet at the same time, smokers themselves need not be ostracized or maligned as human beings. (I have a post in the works dealing with a smoking issue of local concern in which puffwagons are getting the shaft.) In other words, it is possible to condemn the habit without condemning the human.
And yes, I had inspiration for this.
A thought exercise for denialists (and their critics)
- Doc Bushwell is a biochemist and a medical writer who serves as a slavering minion of the dark lords of Big and Little Pharma; Jim is an engineering professor with a fondness for running shoes and drumsticks; and Kevin Beck is a self-exiled member of the clan who refuses to stay gone.
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#1 by outeast on May 23, 2008 - 5:22 am
You need to put the second paragraph of the adjusted quote in italics, too… Until I followed the link, that had me mighty confused.
#2 by sailor on May 23, 2008 - 7:06 am
What are you doing hanging out on fat sites?
#3 by Josh on May 23, 2008 - 12:57 pm
I submit you wouldn’t find this so “fruit-loops” if you had any first-hand experience of how badly treated smokers are. It does not matter how courteous we are – smoking only in our own homes, going outside well away from people – antismokers feel justified in lecturing us publicly as if we were children and didn’t know how unhealthy smoking is. They feel free to lobby for tax increases on tobacco that they claim will be used for smoking cessation programs, then quietly spend on totally unrelated matters because they know tobacco tax increases are politically expedient. Everyone know *those smokers* deserve it anyway, right?
Your naivete about the social phenomenon of the vilification of smokers is all too-apparent:
“Today, only the truly insane or depraved would claim that smoking is anything but pestilential. Yet at the same time, smokers themselves need not be ostracized or maligned as human beings.”
Smoking is “pestilential,” but we “need-not” malign smokers? I’m sorry, but it doesn’t work that way. A public health campaign has turned into a moralizing crusade that has far exceeded the bounds of propriety and decency to other human beings. I realized how far this had gone when, during a phone conversation at work, somehow the person on the other end of the line turned the topic to smoking. Mind you, this was a woman who had called me for advice in my professional capacity (nonprofit work wholly unrelated to smoking or health issues). When I could tolerate her mean-spirited denigration of smokers no longer, I informed her she should be more careful before assuming that anyone she was talking to was a nonsmoker. Without missing a beat, she said, “But you’re educated and have a professional job. . . .how could you be a smoker?” It had clearly never occurred to her that a smoker could be an educated white collar professional – why, aren’t we all living in trailers with constantly pregnant wives?
The problem, Kevin, is that “condemning the habit” without condemning the people works no better than the fundie claim to “hate the sin but not the sinner.” Of course I am not claiming that smoking isn’t harmful – it obviously is. But as an adult, I get to make this choice. That is what really sticks in the craw of the ideological antismokers – they loathe the fact that some of us consciously choose to do something unhealthy, and they can’t (yet) force us not to. To reconcile this cognitive dissonance, they imagine us as insane, deluded, depraved, or fundamentally immoral. Don’t kid yourself about damning behavior and not the person, and don’t think some of us don’t recognize self-righteous sanctimony for exactly what it is. Don’t dress it up as honest, disinterested concern for other people’s welfare. Until you recognize that leaving people alone to make choices – even ones you find foolish – is part of treating them with common human decency, you’re merely being patronizing.
- An obstinate smoker who pays taxes and contributes to society just like you.
#4 by Kevin Beck on May 23, 2008 - 1:25 pm
outeast:
Didn’t bother looking at the post in IE, as I use the generally less permissive Firefox and reckon that if things look cool there, they’ll be fine in other browsers. I fixed it.
Josh:
“The problem, Kevin, is that ‘condemning the habit’ without condemning the people works no better than the fundie claim to ‘hate the sin but not the sinner.’”
Come on, man, that’s bullshit, and two-tiered bullshit at that.
If you take anti-smoking statutes and public-health information campaigns as mechanisms of “condemning that habit,” and see no evidence therein of personal contempt for smokers, then your complaint is wrong on its face. Sure, you’ll always have people who lump “smoking is gross” in there with “smokers are gross,” but they’re in the minority, and they aren’t the sort of people you want to hang out with anyway. Some people are adamant about never wanting to date someone who smokes, but this is plainly not a character judgment but a practical one — people don’t like the smell or the risks borne by second-hand smoke, and you can hardly blame them.
Also, the fundies give the lie to their “love the sinner” mantra every step of the way. For one thing, the “sins” they want to root out are not categorically harmful things like smoking is. These assholes who want to decide whether everyone else should get to kick a certain skychopath to their mental curbs by not “accepting” him, have pre-marital sex, have same-sex relations, and so on don’t bother acknowledging that these things are perfectly fine when consensual because no one is harmed by them — not the “perps,” not observers. Just God’s sense of propriety, apparently, and by extension that of the fundies.
If people were saying, “I only want you to quit smoking because I care,” and then busily lobbying to have cigarettes banned everywhere and pointing out that you’ll spend eternity in torture-plagued damnation unless you quit, you might have a point.
I also resent the implication that I pay taxes and contribute to the community. I don’t do shit.
#5 by Brian Erb on May 23, 2008 - 3:08 pm
A simple rule of thumb that I have evoked in the past. Smoking should be illegal everywhere that nudity or masturbation is illegal and for the same reasons. A nudist or masturbators rights are not infringed on by restricting them to private areas or specially designated clubs.
#6 by Brian Erb on May 23, 2008 - 3:08 pm
A simple rule of thumb that I have evoked in the past. Smoking should be illegal everywhere that nudity or masturbation is illegal and for the same reasons. A nudist or masturbators rights are not infringed on by restricting them to private areas or specially designated clubs.
#7 by equine potamuse on May 24, 2008 - 9:16 am
Everyone agrees that with adequate willpower one can conquer any addiction or vice: smoking, alcohol, drugs, over-eating, etc.
Is there scientific support for the use of any drug or other method to increase one’s willpower?
Or do we have to rely on prayer? (Hard for this atheist.)
I’m asking a serious question.
#8 by patrick on May 24, 2008 - 11:02 am
After my mother died of lung cancer last year, my thoughts concerning smoking have been modified. First let me state that I am a nonsmoker and do not like the smell. Both of my parents smoked into their 70′s and I have two siblings that are smokers. My mother only stopped smoking about a year before she was diagnosed. What surprised me was how quickly the cancer spread and ended her life. In one sense, there was an element of gratitude on my part for her quick death, albeit with a lot of pain. Pain management and hospice were both involved and helped in various ways.
I dont approve of smoking around children, littering the world with cigarette butts or lazy and corrupt politicians that do nothing to reign in corporations. Why couldn’t cigarettes be made with filters that breakdown or without them entirely? Why do smokers hang their cigarettes out their cars and discard them without a thought for the litter they cause?
#9 by tincture on May 24, 2008 - 11:34 am
Because smokers are just people and people litter. Yes, even non-smokers.