Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, July 25, 1993 TAG: 9309050321
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: D3 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: ADRIAN BLEVINS-CHURCH
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
We may eat so many french fries our hearts finally explode; we may drive drunk into a concrete building; and we may even leave a pistol loaded in the house for neighborhood children to find and use, um, against us. It is also possible that we may shop ourselves to spiritual death or get an incurable cancer from drinking contaminated water near a cement plant that decides to burn hazardous waste in exchange for the mighty buck.
And isn't it also true that people who fail to separate the gun from its ammunition, people who are addicted to the daily fast-food hamburger, and executives who are more than eager to burn hazardous waste to the physical detriment of entire communities can live without being ostracized for their bad habits, while cigarette smokers cannot?
Isn't it significant that the hazardous-waste-burning executive endangers the lives of others (as do the drunken driver and the crack pusher), while the cigarette smoker, as long as she agrees to smoke in areas where oxygen is plentiful, endangers only herself?
Our New Age health consciousness has its advantages, of course. People are finally thinking about preventive medicine and are thus more likely to live better and longer. But the disadvantage of this neo-Puritanism, aside from the runner's shattered foot and the dieter's anemia, is that it may lead us into making moral assumptions or judgments about people who involve themselves in activities we do not consider healthy. Such attitudes clearly run contrary to many of the principles Americans consider essential to their definitions of a free society.
Just imagine the weeping of European mothers and fathers when their adult offspring came home and suddenly announced plans to sail to the New World. Those parents must have imagined nothing, at that moment, save the dangers of that voyage.
And, of course, serious jeopardies did lurk in and beyond those ocean waters. Many of our pioneers died on the sea, and many more died in their first months here.
While making the decision to journey to newly found land cannot for long be compared to smoking a cigarette, this analogy is not without its merits. The fact is that those individuals - though poor, uneducated and sometimes victims of societies that could no longer provide places for them - at least had the opportunity to plan their own futures and to dictate the nature of their own lives.
We must be willing to grant one another the freedom to make individual choices, even if some medical professional believes our choices foolish. The best way for us to teach others what to do and what not to do is to give those others the gift of experience. Through experience, most of us will find our way.
While smokers should be considerate of those who do not like to smell or breathe smoke, nonsmokers should also avoid shunning the smoker's bad habit and should especially avoid criticizing the smoker's person in general. Perhaps Sir Thomas Brown had it right when he said in the 17th century that ``they [who] endeavor to abolish vice destroy also virtue.'' The smoker's vice is not healthy, but neither is it healthy to overextend a credit card, work 75 hours a week to the neglect of small children, or ignore the homeless, crazy or destitute.
Andrei Codrescu, the well-known poet and occasional commentator for National Public Radio's "All Things Considered," visited Hollins College awhile back to give a talk on the so-called Romanian revolution of 1990. Codrescu left Romania in his early 20s for, I'm sure, a variety of complex reasons, but that night he said he left Romania because, after hearing a Beatles' tune, he wanted to ``go where they played music like that.''
I was standing outside the building smoking a cigarette before the speech, when Codrescu (I recognized him from the posters) walked toward me and lit up a cigarette himself. I said something about it being a shame that the smokers were condemned to partake in the cold.
After a pause, and in a most exotic Eastern European accent, this man originally from the bowels of fascism took a drag off his Vantage and told me that such a condemnation was, indeed, ``just another form of exile.''
\ Adrian Blevins-Church teaches writing at Hollins College and Virginia Western Community College.
by CNB