It’s happening everywhere, not just at FAU. The battle line is being drawn all across the country between smokers and non-smokers.
On campus, you can notice the smokers quietly inhabiting the little nooks and crannies of buildings, staying off to the side as if not to offend those who are opposed to a little carbon monoxide on an express train straight to their lungs.
Restaurants, bars, and pretty much every public place you can think of has banned smoking. Heck, even outdoor places like parks and arenas have banned smoking. Alabama is the only state that has no restriction on smoking in public places.
Nowadays, with all these statistics available, it’s only a matter of time until the second-hand smokers put a halt to the freedoms of being able to smoke anywhere. Those who choose to protect their body rather than harm it are winning this civil rights battle.
You can’t really blame them, though, when you think about it. Smoking really is stupid. As one of the millions of fools who is under the spell of the tobacco companies, I can admit that it’s a dumb thing to do, but that doesn’t stop me.
Cigarettes will make your fingers smell, your clothes smell, your breath smell, your teeth yellow, and your skin leathery, not to mention THEY’LL KILL YOU!
So why do we keep doing it? This addiction is really a mystery to me. At this point, smoking is almost like a counter-culture movement. In response to everyone saying, “Put out those cigarettes!” the smokers are saying “You can’t make us!”
It’s a movement of millions who are opting for mass suicide rather than be told what to do. It’s kind of romantic, in a sick sort of way.
So here’s my proposed solution. Let’s say the population of smokers can be broken down into two sub-categories: those who need to smoke, and those who like to smoke.
Those who need to smoke will continue to buy cigarettes until they’re dead. Most of them will smoke a cigarette through the trachea hole in their neck when the time comes. Since they’re knee deep in addiction, it will be hard to get them to quit, but not impossible.
As one of those smokers who simply enjoys a good cigarette every now and again, I have concocted a plan so crazy it just might work.
“Bumming” cigarettes is something any smoker has done at some point, for one reason or another. So what we gotta do is bum from the fiends until they get so fed up that they quit.
A smoker has got to assume that in each pack he/she buys, they will have to assign one or two giveaways to grubbers. They are not happy about it, but that’s the whole spirit of this smoking movement: that a smoker will never leave another smoker high and dry. So they’ll give away a couple and not think anything of it. But what if it becomes six, seven or eight per pack? They’ll get so frustrated that they’ll quit!
To kick the nation’s smoking habit, half of us will bum cigarettes and the other half will be so sick of supporting the first half’s habit that they’ll quit.
