FURIOUS nads! by The One True b!X

I’ve smoked since 1989, when in an acrobatic feat of illogic I made the girlfriend who had just broken up with me at the end of the Summer hand me a cigarette and teach me how to smoke it. It was meant somehow to punish her.

That introduction should solidify the premise that we smokers aren’t on the whole a very bright lot.

I offer that bit of my personal history as a background of sorts to what I’m about to say about the increasing support for bans on smoking in public places.

More to the point, I don’t have much to say about the public policy debate itself, because that’s not what I’m interesed in here. Rather, there’s a cultural issue about smokers themelves which comes into play, and that’s the question at hand here.

(Most popular amongst the reasons for such bans, which usually focus on smoking in restaurants and bars, is the worker health and safety argument. That aspect procudes mixed feelings for me on the public policy side, since it’s more than a little difficult to come out against the premise of worker health and safety.)

I tend towards the notion that, of all places, bars in fact almost entirely are about vice. They are where people go to drink, smoke, and hook up. Generally speaking, people don’t go to bars thinking they are something other than this.

And I say this despite the fact that I myself have for the most part forsaken the bar scene.

But what I really want to say is this: Today’s renewed push for smoking bans would not be quite so venomous if not for the rather distressingly large numbers of smokers who, frankly, are assholes about their smoking.

For a smoker, I’m rather pleasant and considerate. I make use of ashtrays when they are available. If they aren’t, I stub out my cigarettes and toss them into trashcans. If there’s no immediately-available trashcan, I put them back into my cigarette case to be thrown away later on.

I don’t toss my cigarettes into the street or onto the sidewalk. I don’t smoke in bus shelters. I don’t smoke around children, and if there’s one approaching in a baby stroller, I either put my cigarette out or hide it behind me as they pass so they don’t even see me smoking, let alone encounter the smoke.

All of which, you don’t need me to tell you, is spectacularly rare behavior for a smoker.

Were it not quite so rare, the emotional heat of the debate over smoking bans perhaps would not be so intense. If smokers were not out there making an even worse name for themselves than they already have, by refusing to engage in even the most basic notions of courtesy, we could stick to debating the specific issues relevant to arguments such as worker health and safety.

Instead, my fellow smokers, my nicotine bretheren, often seem to believe they have absolutely no responsibility to anyone else around them — making them precisely the sort of people likely to find themselves on the receiving end of public scorn that, if it couldn’t be avoided entirely, could at least have been far less full of outright animus.

There’s a legitimate public policy debate on the issue of worker health and safety. But it’s distorted by the visceral reaction people have to smokers — a reaction that the worst of us smokers have made harsher than it needed to be, by ceding the moral high ground of simple common courtesy.