Mandatory buckle-up laws set the precedent: Even your own body
in your own car is no longer your own personal space.
Here’s how it works: The government decides that whatever
it is you’re doing is “unsafe” — not specifically in your case,
just generally -- maybe,
might be, could be — then asserts the legal
authority to criminalize whatever it is you’re doing.
Which means, it asserts the right to arrest you at gunpoint and
threaten you implicitly and perhaps explicitly with lethal violence
in order to force you to submit and obey.
Now they’re coming for your cigarettes.
A study just released by the CDC (see
here) characterizes second-hand smoke as the
latest threat to “safety” — and of course, “the children.” It
urges what you’d expect: That it be made illegal to smoke
in your own car, at least, if “the children” are present and
possibly even if they’re not. For as any smoker knows — as anyone
who has shopped for used cars knows — any car that has been smoked
in retains the essence of the Marlboro Man for years, even decades
after the last butt was crumpled in the ashtray. There is no way to
objectively tell whether a car was smoked in last week — or 10
minutes ago. Hence, it is likely that any evidence of smoking —
ever — will presently become sufficient excuse for the
police to issue tickets, stop people at gunpoint, and perhaps even
confiscate their vehicles (as is routinely done when another form
of smoke is discovered).
“There is no risk-free level of exposure to second-hand
smoke,” the CDC study states with authority. Except of course
that’s anthead nonsense. Is the CDC really going to claim
that, for example, a teenager who buys a used car that was smoked
in previously is exposing himself to a measurable danger thereby?
Or that if he accepts a ride in an adult’s car — said adult having
smoked a cigarette a few hours previously — that the kid has
thereby increased his risk of becoming emphysematic or developing
lung cancer? It’s absurd.
This isn’t a defense of smoking. It’s a plea for the
restoration of sanity. Please, people — how about some perspective
— and proportion?
Notice the quasi-religious aspect, too.
You can almost hear the high-pitched sermonizing of these
latter day secular Elmer Gantrys. “The car is the only source of
exposure for some of these children,” says the CDC’s Brian King.
“So if you can reduce the exposure, it’s definitely advantageous
for health.”
For liberty (and reasonableness) not so
much.
As with the jihad against alcohol — which metastasized
from reasonable concern over cavalier attitudes toward drinking and
driving into the absurd characterization of any drinking
before driving as “drunk” driving — smoking cigarettes
anywhere, anytime, has been demonized as an evil on the
order of pederasty that must be extirpated by any means necessary.
It is no longer enough that smokers refrain from smoking in
public areas. If there is any chance whatever that a
non-smoker might catch a whiff, then it becomes a matter
of public concern. Hence, smokers are already prohibited
from smoking even in their own apartments or condos — and yes,
even on the steps of their own porches, too. After all, someone
might be exposed to second-hand smoke.
Shortly, you will not even be permitted to smoke in your
own vehicle, for the same reasons. Doesn’t matter that you have the
windows rolled up — and don’t have kids, for that matter. What
about the poor attendant at the parking garage who might be exposed
to the dangerous remnants of your anti-social choice to smoke? Or
the child who might buy your ex-car three years from now?
It’s no exaggeration. It’s depressing reality.
And it’d be comical — if it weren’t so tragic.
Peddling cigs to kids is one thing. Criminalizing adults
for “exposing” a kid to a distant whiff of this morning’s Lucky
Strike (or last year’s Lucky Strike) is quite another. The erosion
of our personal space continues apace — and it will not end until
we have no personal space left - because in the minds of the
collectivist thugs who control this country, there is no such
thing as “personal” space. Anything you do could —
conceivably — affect someone else. It need not be a specific,
demonstrable harm — the standard of long-gone America. Just a
theoretical “risk” — however vague, non-specific and generalized
— will do just fine. And it is going to become the
all-encompassing rationale for total state control within the next
24 months, once Obamacare becomes the duly anointed
“constitutional” law of the land.
