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>>Also sleaze, this sort of ban is not at all unprecedented in the U.S. and I think it's not such political suicide as you suggest. The last two places I lived, Madison WI and Los Angeles, both had such bans, and I had to get used to smoking being allowed in restaurants again.>>
Yeah, I remember reading about legislation being tossed around and considered to eliminate smoking in Los Angeles public parks. Aside from how dubious it is for some people to complain about cigarette smoke in an open area, L.A.'s not exactly known for its flowery atmosphere.
If I lived an L.A., I'd put a cigarette in my mouth just to keep the air out.
I guess you're right about the precedence for this kind of thing, Persephone, especially in California. Why would it be controversial, when it's part of a framework made up of all kinds of social engineering legislation trying to be passed by Republicans and Democrats alike, and it's been going on for a better part of a century, whether it's the war on drugs, or all kinds of "obscenity" cases.
We've gotten used to people from all walks of life trying to shoehorn everybody else, through government power, into their version of The Way Things Should Be.
If Senator Tankerbell doesn't protect us from our own stiffies, who will?
I'm kind of torn up about it, because on the one hand we did get things like the Civil Rights Movement out of it. Then I think, outside of dismantling the laws that forced racism on people(like segregation), were new laws and legislation that forced the opposite, like affirmative action quotas and anti-descriminatory civil suits, right or necessary?
I don't know. I've gone on cross country trips, and outside of major metropolitan areas like New York, and even in some major cities, white, black, and hispanic people each had their own respective neighborhoods, markets, salons, and the like, and don't mingle, even in the workplaces they're forced to integrate into. In Miami, where I live(I'm Cuban by the way), as the Spanish people came in, all the white people moved north, and as the Hispanic population grows and moves northward, Whitey moves further north still.
In spite of the drug laws, more than a third of all the people I know drop acid and smoke weed on a regular basis. These are normal people you see at work everyday. They don't even have piercings. Really.
I'm getting off topic, but what I'm trying to get at here is this: I'm not sure how effective or right the idea behind the smoking bans, and all the other laws and legislation like it, is. At best, it seems to have minimal to no effect; at worst, like with the Drug War, it creates needless violence.
The anti-smoking ordinances might have noble intentions, but are misguided. I tend to lean torward believing that people have the right to do whatever they want with their own bodies and property, and I believe many of societies problems grow out of people and governments violating these freedoms. |
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