To smokers: this might make you mad. Read at your own risk...
A Smoking Gun is usually a reference to something that shows conclusive evidence of a crime.
I think that cigarettes should be classified as gun...a smoking gun. Smoking kills people. That's the sum of the whole thing. Why is that so hard to understand?
It makes living difficult. My brother does not smoke, but his wife smokes. I love my sister-in-law, but if I could change one thing, it would be to stop her from smoking. I listen to my brother's constant cough, and I think about how young my Dad was when he died. I don't want my brother to die until he's 99. My brother says that the coughing is asthma; I think, I know, it's cigarettes.
It complicates things. When I was little, my dad smoked a pipe. (Before I remember, it was cigarettes and cigars. I've seen pictures.) He was a handsome young man. He looked like the movie stars with that ciggie hanging on his lip. I would get into his pretty yellow truck and see the tar and nicotine coating the roof completely brown. That truck was his body. It looked great, but the inside...his lungs...were ugly. He stopped smoking about 10 years before he had a quintuple heart bypass in 1986. After years and years of smoke-free lungs, he was still coughing and spitting up the remnants. Our bodies are our temples, not our smoke dens.
It's a trick. It doesn't give pleasure. It's a temporary feeling that is fake and makes you feel like crap in the long run. It's a fake orgasm. No meaning. True pleasure comes from smiling and laughing and connecting to another human. Yesterday, at church, we sat in the back. I so enjoyed the whole hour, not due to the homily or ritual, but because of the Gerber baby sitting next to me. Those rambunctious toddlers running around made me smile and laugh and gave me hope for the future of mankind. Dragging on the stick...makes you cough and die.
It's not glamorous. For a while, no one smoked in movies, but movies are again displaying how sexy it is. It's not sexy! Have you looked at an ashtray? That's your mouth. Gross. Smoking calms you or excites you? Really? Does it give true pleasure from a mental or emotional or spiritual cause? Or just the physical? What does that make you?
Smoking is a gun. You stick it in your mouth, and it's killing you. You wave it around, and you're killing the rest of us.
3 comments:
I know, Mary. You're not telling me anything that I don't know. I know it really, really bugs you... and I'm so sorry.
I don't:
-cheat
-lie
-steal
-judge
-condemn
-make fun of people
-get angry
-talk negative
-boast
-yell
-scream
-hate
-blame
-accuse
-fight
-hurt
But I do smoke.
And so if that's all you see when you're around me, I'm so sorry. One of these days I'll quit, but I'm not going to (or can't) do it for anyone other than for myself. Until then, I'm hoping you'll look past it and see the rest of me. If not, that will suck (no pun intended).
Ironically, none of my friends (that we hang around regularly) smoke. But, all of Ira's friends do. I saw an ashtray the other day that looks like lungs and everytime you use it, it wheezes and coughs. I told Ira we need to buy one of those for each of his friends :-)
Mary, I totally understand your feelings on this. As a more recent non-smoker I will share my perspective. Smoking is disgusting and it stinks BUT...
It's REALLY, REALLY hard to quit - experts say it's harder to quit smoking than to quit heroin...so please understand this when you are around smoking people.
It can be really scary to give up all of the things that smoking seems to be associated with - certain friends, makes that cup of coffee taste better, comfort.
It is a substance that fools a lot of people into thinking that it is giving them pleasure. I did it myself for years. But a person cannot quit smoking for the sake of anyone else but themselves.
It took me YEARS to finally quit. For me the incentive was because I was determined to make a baby. I wanted a baby more that anything and that was my incentive. But it was still really, really hard. I tried to quit in the past for my husband, for my dad (because he died of cancer), for lots of other reasons...but until I decided to do it for ME it never worked.
No amount of preaching or disgust from others was ever going to work on me. So just know that as frustrating as it is for non-smokers to deal with the things that come with the "smoker package", it's also frustrating to hear people preach and complain.
But...when those people do finally quit....you can do a great job of being supportive of their decision.
(P.S. I never really felt you were judging me about my smoking..just sharing my experience.)
XO - love ya!
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