So, Obama, the first black Caesar of the empire has “ordered” a ban on smoking in all public housing. Another victory for Washington, the crass capital of the world. I’m sure all the bureaucrats will cheer as this is their prosperity, their gain, their product of their officious little minds. They can order people to do what they want them to do because people-sorts need direction, instruction, delivery from evil. They need to know that bureaucrats have studied philosophy, attitude, the limits of mankind’s reaches, and proclivities of all who need help and salvation. God bless Washington and its government animals; the arches of knowledge bow over them and imbue them with such comprehension that we all crumble before them in bent humiliation. Crap!
I ain’t throwing my pipe away. Not only that I’m going to keep driving down the government paid federal highway smoking my pipe, blowing smoke out the window and hope it settles on the damn government concrete.
The sadness of these types of things is that they are always divide and conquer. That is, most people don’t smoke (never was a majority) but the non-smoking majority gleefully (and timidly) accept these decrees because it means nothing to them and as well have been conned by the second-hand smoke canard. Many of these folks will walk down the streets of Manhattan feeling they have pink-lined lungs because they revile a good Havana but love a good bus exhaust inhale. Meanwhile their neighbors, whom they deign as fools for smoking, are led away in metaphorical handcuffs by the same Washington thugs who will come after them one day for their toilets or bathtubs or wrong-textured toilet paper or improper foods or whatever strikes the bureaucratic fancy of the moment. And there will always be a moment for these regulator/rulers because if not they wouldn’t have jobs.
It has been some years since I was in the military, but at that time, in the field, we were served C-Rations. This little food kit included as an aside a small five pack of cigarettes. Those who didn’t smoke, about half the guys, would use them for bartering power. The rest would smoke them when the smoking lamp was lit. I don’t know what the numbers are today for the men in the military insofar as smokers and nonsmokers. My guess would be that far less than half smoke, though many possibly still do. All of this is to say to Caesar Obama: Is the foxhole some P.F.C. digs and sets his weary butt in for the night government housing?
To smokers and nonsmokers alike (you are in the same bed like it or not): I think it is probably too late for both of you (us). Washington decrees these things because it can. It can do whatever it wishes. And it will continue to do so. Washington owns us. Meanwhile, smoke ‘em if you got ‘em. But dig your own damn foxhole.