Nonsmokers or general sadists hoping to find a contrasting voice here are going to be disappointed. Although I’m not putting it as elegantly or professionally as Kelly Lucia did, I agree with just about everything Lucia had to say. There is a disturbing trend in this country. On second thought, there are a lot of disturbing trends in this country, but I think the recent smoking ban in Illinois highlights one of the larger problems. A growing number of people think they know how you ought to live; they are often the same people who don’t read or follow the news and think that spell-check solves everything. Everybody used to have a place to go. Smokers had bars and casinos, and nonsmokers had pretty much the rest of the state. Most public buildings, offices, and restaurants were already nonsmoking years ago. But that wasn’t enough, was it? These Holier-Than-Thou elitists want to make sure we’re not even allowed to smoke outside, especially within 15 feet of a building. A window might be open. An unpleasant odor could drift dangerously close to their nostrils. “Stop clogging up the air I breathe with cancer-causing secondhand smoke,” they say, as they turn the ignition on their SUVs.
Chicago Sun-Times columnist Zay N. Smith has a name for these people: The International Federation of People Who Enjoy Pushing Other People Around and Seem to Have Found a Socially Acceptable Way to Do It. It’s a lengthy moniker, but an appropriate one. These people come from the same place as those who oppose gay marriage, blindly support the Patriot Act, or never think too deeply about the war in Iraq beyond slogans like “Support Our Troops.” In other words, morons who want to tell you how to live. What’s next? Cell phone laws? How about mandatory seatbelt laws? Curfew? Bedtime?
It is one thing to ask people to make relatively minor changes that will benefit everybody, but those are the types of things on which we apparently can’t agree. Universal healthcare? No. People have been convinced that they don’t want free healthcare, that taxes would be raised to unbearable heights. What about cars that run on something besides oil? Are you kidding me? Those things will have to be recharged every couple hundred miles, and they probably won’t even be able to go 200 mph. But smoking in public? Yes. Now that is an issue everyone can get behind, and sadly, without smokers or rational people raising much of a fuss.
Our minds and our spirits have been so efficiently broken that not only do we allow others to make choices for us, but also we seem to like it, to rely on it. We are a generation of Americans who have essentially moved back in with our parents, except our parents have been replaced, and the people running the show are merely the loudest, dumbest voices in the room.