Smoking Banshees
Many of the hip smoking addicts who bitched and moaned last night about the smoking ban claimed it was a plot by suburbanites to impose their values on city folk. That’s bullshit—as one Stranger reader pointed out in a comment:
Where do people get the idea that the smoking ban is a suburban thing?It’s not - it’s very urban. Crowded cities are where smoking bugs enough non-smokers to make it an issue. That’s why you now have smoking bans in LA, NY, Dublin - even in Italian cities, the place where cities were invented.
It’s out in hicksville where most of the smoking crowd originally hails from that this idea of smoking as some kind of inalienable right comes from.
Move back to Eastern Washington or Wyoming or whereever it was you came from if you can’t handle life in the big city.
The mentality is completely suburban. The mentality that would persecute a minority population with a drug addiction at the expense of persecuting, for example, SUV owners who release several times more toxic fumes every day into an average person's lungs, is what truly alarms the disinterested observer.
It's the mentality of the state knows best, and that we will take care of you for yourself.
It's the suburban mentality of hipster young "urban" kids who are really nascent yuppies condemning having to pass a smoke plume on the sidewalk then going home and smoking a joint or inhaling from a bong, which is several times more harmful to your lungs than tobacco smoke, then going to a now-nonsmoking club that hosts a band that drives around in one of those incredibly polluting and noxious monster vans one sees almost daily parked on Capitol Hill (one on Saturday, at rest, was releasing a cloud of smoke that literally engulfed the entire street).
It's a suburban, anti-adult, and noxious mentality that causes one to legally persecute a small minority of the state's population because they find passing acquaintance with the effects of their drug addiction offensive. It's the small-minded mindset that screams "second hand smoke damage" when so-called "scientific proof" of such has been shown to be conclusively flawed.
Soon our hip young yuppies, in concert with placid "concerned" voters who actually live in suburbs, will outlaw smoking in public spaces and on sidewalks and eventually in one's private cars and homes, because together, they know best.
I am a nonsmoker from a family who smoked. I once smoked but no longer do. All the same, I pity those people who think that smoking bans are at all progressive. The funny thing is, it's a completely suburban mindset that thinks it's being progressive, yet it's all about selfishess and hitting the poorest (most smokers tend to come from lower socioeconomic brackets) with your "right" to not inhale a passing plume of tobacco smoke. Most of all it's the suburban mindset that thinks that's one body is so sensitive it cannot withstand a passing cigarette trail, because ultimately you can choose to avoid a smoking establishment and to avoid smokers themselves.
It's all about how precious our serious hipster children are that they cannot even tolerate the ephemeral wisp of cigarette smoke in the air while happily ingesting a drug that completely incapacitates their thinking and ruins their lungs and then hopping into a car that pollutes far more lungs than that poor fellow smoking on the street. Such a "modern" mindset is not only ignorant and appallingly conservative, but actually quite frightening. I shudder to see what our society is becoming. But go on -- celebrate!! Celebrate all ye ultra progressive precious children who have legally persecuted a minority drug population because your bodies and "sensibilities" are so very, very precious. Celebrate your ignorance and your mendacity tonight -- in fresh clean air while you dance intoxicated and oblivious to what you are forming -- a society of fascists!