Tormenting smokers - and liking it

I was so pleased with my response posting today on Paul Soglin's Waxing America blog that I am re-posting it here.  I hope they do not mind.  They were discussing yet another smoking law.  This one is a statewide ban proposal.  Here is my response to the pundits:  

Ah, the poetry of irony.  I don't smoke but always look for paradox in issues like this that advance the nanification-of-American society.  Yet another smoking law would strain the paradigm of the notion of an orderly paradise.  A person would not be able to smoke in a casino, but could gamble away their very soul under the smiling face of the government.  A person would not be able to have one last cigarette with some friends at the neighborhood bar before going off to Iraq to be blown to bits.  Smoking might advance a person's hastening of old-age health issues and burden the health care system - oh yes, many of us can't get health care anyway. Perhaps people could sneak out behind the barn an grab a drag - after all, the farmer does not use it, the family farm is just a patch of weeds now.  Perhaps I could light one last butt up before some maniac guns me down while I stop on the way home for some soda pop and eggs at the quick mart.  Don't smoke in front of your pets and kids either. Oh, yes, the Chinese poisoned my dog and a maniac gunned down my kid.  And how is that war on drugs going?

Cigarettes are a soft target. There is something satisfying about lording over those that are weaker than us non-smokers.  Cigarette smokers have no power. They huddle in doorways in the icy wind while they steal a break from their non-benefit, part-time job.  They are relegated to the status of crack addicts.  They should be pushed to the underground culture of society were they belong.   We should embrace that we can crush them socially and it affords us power to be arrogant and get away with it - and we like that.  It is about the only thing in society we seem able to influence any more.  And, smokers are the only group left it is politically correct to openly torment.  I am concerned that once cigarette smokers are all gone, and the last lung cancer wing is turned into a compound for old people with no health care, we will have to find another class of people to lord over and that search may be fatiguing.  Hey, wait, perhaps it could be the uninsured, it is their fault after all - just stay tuned.

We embrace gambling, war, guns, the Chinese mafia that supplies our food ingredients to us as our own farms fall by the way, we have a whole generation who has no health care, that same generation has never known what it is like to have weekends off,  the illegal drugs keep pouring in, and many of us languish at part-time, non-benefit jobs; but, let my tell you this.  By the grace of what ever God you bring with you, you better not smoke in that neighborhood bar. 

This week's Wisconsin soldier to remember is Mathew Schram, a major in the Army's 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment. He was killed on May 26, 2003 about 100 miles northwest of Baghdad in Haditha, Iraq.  His resupply mission convoy came under attack from gunmen who opened fire with rocket-propelled grenades and machine guns.  The Brookfield native was 36.  He was in ROTC while at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater before joining the Army in 1989 and participating in the first Gulf War 12 years prior. 

3,315 Americans have been killed in Iraq since Spring 2003. 

71 Wisconsin Soldiers have been killed in Iraq since Spring 2003.