There's always a "butt"
May. 30th, 2008 05:05 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
penfield"There are a lot of people for whom a cigarette is about the only vacation they have."
- Trey Parker (Co-creator of "South Park")
Despite our reservations, J. and I re-upped on our apartment with a short-term, three-month lease. It's going to cost us an extra $75 per month (over the rate for a 12-month lease) but it's going to take at least through the summer for us to get our act together and figure out where we're going to live.
As I was delivering our form to the administration office this morning, I noticed that there was a pack of Marlboros on the building manager's desk. I generally like to give strangers the benefit of my presumption as decent people, even when they are nominally affiliated with a fascist regime. But seeing the cigarettes there on her desk totally altered my perception of her.
In one moment, she was a crusty but plainly nonthreatening bureaucrat, somebody's kindly grandmother. In the next, she was either a common, weak-willed office drone or a corrupt, coldhearted villain. All because I discovered she was a smoker.
Personally and socially, I find smoking to be an abhorrent habit. I have never smoked, myself, so perhaps there is some small-mindedness or self-righteousness in that position. But I do have a close family member who has been a smoker for fifty years and another who's still learning, so I am not without some frustrated sympathy.
Intellectually, it would be easy to castigate the average smoking habit as indicative of frail moral fiber, but it can just as easily be rationalized as a chemical dependency or a psycho-physiological disease -- the American Psychological Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV) includes both nicotine dependence and withdrawl among its maladies.
In this way smoking is publicly stigmatized in the same way as alcoholism and recreational drug use, except that smoking is more heavily scrutinized because it is black-and-white: while there is a fairly smooth continuum of alcohol and drug use, ranging from harmless to dangerous, you are either a smoker or you're not -- either a plume-spouting murderous harbinger of black cancer death or Joe Boy Scout. I feel for those people who are smokers but aren't actually assholes, even if my knee-jerk reaction is to assume they are assholes.
The world is becoming a better place for non-smokers, and I think that's a good thing. I recognize smoking's toll on public and environmental health. I applaud the work that JRR is doing with the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids and the work of all the other activists who share the same goals.
But I also think that kicking smokers out of bars and restaurants is a little silly, considering that alcholics and the obese are invited to stay inside with the booze and the french fries for as long as they like. And I'd like to get to the point where I can love the sinner, hate the sin. But I'm not there yet.
- Trey Parker (Co-creator of "South Park")
Despite our reservations, J. and I re-upped on our apartment with a short-term, three-month lease. It's going to cost us an extra $75 per month (over the rate for a 12-month lease) but it's going to take at least through the summer for us to get our act together and figure out where we're going to live.
As I was delivering our form to the administration office this morning, I noticed that there was a pack of Marlboros on the building manager's desk. I generally like to give strangers the benefit of my presumption as decent people, even when they are nominally affiliated with a fascist regime. But seeing the cigarettes there on her desk totally altered my perception of her.
In one moment, she was a crusty but plainly nonthreatening bureaucrat, somebody's kindly grandmother. In the next, she was either a common, weak-willed office drone or a corrupt, coldhearted villain. All because I discovered she was a smoker.
Personally and socially, I find smoking to be an abhorrent habit. I have never smoked, myself, so perhaps there is some small-mindedness or self-righteousness in that position. But I do have a close family member who has been a smoker for fifty years and another who's still learning, so I am not without some frustrated sympathy.
Intellectually, it would be easy to castigate the average smoking habit as indicative of frail moral fiber, but it can just as easily be rationalized as a chemical dependency or a psycho-physiological disease -- the American Psychological Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV) includes both nicotine dependence and withdrawl among its maladies.
In this way smoking is publicly stigmatized in the same way as alcoholism and recreational drug use, except that smoking is more heavily scrutinized because it is black-and-white: while there is a fairly smooth continuum of alcohol and drug use, ranging from harmless to dangerous, you are either a smoker or you're not -- either a plume-spouting murderous harbinger of black cancer death or Joe Boy Scout. I feel for those people who are smokers but aren't actually assholes, even if my knee-jerk reaction is to assume they are assholes.
The world is becoming a better place for non-smokers, and I think that's a good thing. I recognize smoking's toll on public and environmental health. I applaud the work that JRR is doing with the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids and the work of all the other activists who share the same goals.
But I also think that kicking smokers out of bars and restaurants is a little silly, considering that alcholics and the obese are invited to stay inside with the booze and the french fries for as long as they like. And I'd like to get to the point where I can love the sinner, hate the sin. But I'm not there yet.
