Tobacco has been around longer then any of us. A legal commodity. Then, along came the anti's that saw a way to make big bucks, and they convinced the government that smokers are 'dirty filthy people.' The smokers were shamed into believing this. The smokers were co-orsed into believing that we needed to buy those expensive quit smoking drugs from Big Pharm.
There are 55 million of us in the United States, Joe. We are quick to stand up for our rights in everything else. But why did the smokers let it get this far? I still can't understand this. Smokers outnumber the NRA and the AARP.
Gay marriages is on the horizon and pot smokers will soon see their drug of choice made legal. And the smokers sat back and watched our (legal) relaxation of choice being taken away from us.
Where am I? Where DO we live???
My family raised tobacco in Maryland fron the 1600's to the 1970s. Maryland has gone so far over to the socialists that I would have great difficulty living there.
Ironically, now I live in a state more free, but one which considered socialism in the early 1900s.
Somewhere along the line things got hijacked.
The family was under serious attack by the 1960s, mainly in the schools, but the denigration of McCarthy's Committee on unAmerican Activities (since proven right by soviet documents) may have been the real break point.
True, patriotic, Constitutionally thinking Americans have been browbeat into some modicum of shame for doing almost any virtuous activity ever since.
With this idealogical retreat has come a wholehearted, continuing, assault by the enemies of the Judeo-Christian ethic, and the primary battleground has been America's youth.
This was enabled by the economic upheavals of the late 70's which virtually required a two wage-earner family, and left the kids at the mercy of liberal 'educators' who have been steadily indoctrinating our youth ever since.
The 'reserves' in this battle, our children, are being daily compromised.
I'm raising grandchildren, now. They are the hope for the future.
Tell them the truth, teach them to think, explain the lies. Give them a picture of how it should be and pray, dear God, that it takes hold.
No peaceful swing of the pendulum will happen quickly.
What smokers have never had (unlike the NRA) is an understanding of the incremental nature of the combined assault of media denigration and legislative whittling away, aimed in coordination at banning something. These people didn't want "fair" they wanted it their way and no other. They can't think far enough ahead to see that someday, something they like may be next on the hit list. By then it will be too late.