Administering Life
Ash trays get itchy as they wonder where they’ll be tucked away, storage rooms or garbage bins? Patrons hustle in earlier than usual, for what might be one last day of nicotine enhanced coffee indoors. Neon signs around the city buzz a sigh of relief, perhaps about to finally be rid of the smoky haze that has given them their seedy reputation after all of these decades. One patron bitches about smoker’s rights, as though he was a black woman trying to vote in 1955. Another notes how he hopes it will help him to quit smoking once and for all, as he lights a cigarette and sits down at a wobbling table near the door. I am uncertain as to how I’ll feel, having attempted to quit just recently, only to be thwarted by my own devices.
A cigarette free world would be the IV that healthy lifestyle America needs to keep it afloat as the local vitamin emporium battles to save the lives of those coming out of the bars every night wreaking, hacking, lungs losing the war. So why just have a smoking ban indoors? Why not just outlaw tobacco in general? If there was any semblance of common sense or reality in our government, we’d have made that step a long time ago. Indeed, even as alcoholics are allowed to wreck their families and their cars, marijuana users, notoriously complacent by nature, have had to hide in the shadows and purchase their good times under the scrutiny of prying eyes through alley windows, curtained. Nicotine burned tobacco is the leading cause of accepted drug addiction in these United States, so why has it taken until recent years for cities to take even the small steps of banning burning indoors?
I say, don’t make smoking illegal in places of business, make smoking illegal all together. Step up to the plate and have some balls. And while we’re at it, we might as well ban families from having more than one car and certainly put a ban on driving the car less than 10 blocks or 2 miles, forcing the fat out of our nation; let’s ban trans fats and fast foods, bleached wheat, GMOs, and refined sugars. Decaf coffees could be allowed to remain, for a period of no longer than 5 months, while we all kick that habit and start drinking pure water, rationed by the government so that it doesn’t become an addiction unto itself. Whole milk and butter should go next, certainly followed by a ban on slouching, leaning against walls, elbows on the table and operating a keyboard without the proper carpal-tunnel-preventative gear.
To help ease us into this state of perfect living, the government can act as a buffer – don’t eliminate everything we love, but ration it. Two sugar packets per family per day. One pound of coffee per capita, per month. Once everything is eliminated and we see how well this system works, we can extend it into our everyday lives – walking 5 blocks per day mandatory; saying excuse me to two old ladies and smiling at a child with a balloon are perfunctory on a daily basis.
Capitalism, democracy and free will, after all, work best when regulated by the government.