— where it is now illegal to display cigarette products. This new policy aims to “stamp out smoking by young people.” Canadian retailers must store cigarettes “in drawers or behind gray wall coverings that cost as much as $980, leaving some fuming over the cost, inconvenience, and hypocrisy. ‘It’s a pain in the ass, and a double-standard that the government supports liquor sales,’ ” says a Toronto shop owner. Tobacco, to be sure, kills. But so does liquor. So why can’t they just ban both? Mainly because of America’s experience with Prohibition — and its “war on drugs,” which the feds already lost even before it was declared in 1972 by President Nixon.
Government, in any case, likes to tell us what to do because, let’s face it — we want it to be our nanny. But does it work? Let’s see. After all the high taxes, the endless public education campaigns and those smart and funny TV ads promoting healthy living…people are still drinking, smoking and snorting.
Government nannying seldom works, if at all. Probably because we’re adults already and nannies are for kids only.
The logical consequence of nannyism as a state policy is the welfare state (which is what the CNMI has). Its unstated premise is that you and I are, basically, stupid. It sounds better when stated in theoretical terms, but the bottomline is that people have already been determined by their sexes, family upbringing, religions and — the islands’ favorite scapegoat — “culture.” We can’t help but to be what we already are. And what we are is delusional. Except for the government and its experts who have figured it all out. That’s why government has to be blamed for our tobacco use or the alarming increase in the number of obese people in our midst. It’s government’s job to make us stop smoking. Government has to pry the can of Spam from our cold fat hands.
Now based on my own personal experience, you either have to be a moron or an intellectual to believe all that hogswill.
When I was child in the 1970s, the greatest dude in the world — besides Muhammad Ali and Bruce Lee — was my dad, a cop who smoked Marlboro. All the other older male relatives in our family smoked, too. And they looked so adult, so manly sucking on a cig stick. I wanted to be like them. In seventh grade, I decided to be “cool.” I began to smoke. It was “glamorous” and “hip.” It was the “in” thing. It was only later, in my late teens, when I realized how utterly disgusting smoking was. It was pointless and expensive. It made me cough like a backfiring Pinto. I didn’t become popular with the girls, unless they smoked too and, well, were “easy.” I stank. My breath, my fingers, what I wore, my hair. And my lips were blue — corpse blue.
Worst of all, I was addicted to nicotine.
I decided to quit, cold turkey. I succeeded — on my fifth attempt.
In other words, I smoked because I wanted to. I stopped because I wanted to. And that’s usually the experience of most other people, too.
Government can educate us about the terrible consequences of tobacco or an unhealthy diet, but unless we stop putting poison into our bodies…
Let’s be honest. No one “forces” us to smoke or stuff ourselves with crispy pata and fried rice and then watch TV all day. You, me, we make these choices.
The good news is that, next time, we can choose wisely. But only if we want to.
Dr. Victor M. Frank, Holocaust survivor, witnessed some of the most horrific cruelties ever inflicted on humans in the history of humankind. He experienced life, or what passed for life, in the Nazi concentration camps.
“We who lived in concentration camps,” he later wrote, “can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms — to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”
Now chew on that while I feast on empanadas.
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