For quite awhile, it seemed like the militant nonsmokers were fighting a war they couldn’t possibly lose. One at a time, just about everybody jumped on their successful bandwagon. Since our government is a democracy--which is, after all, run by majority rule--it, too, jumped on the nonsmoking bandwagon. There was an underlying sense of hats and horns and full party regalia behind every statistical shrink in the number of smokers, in every one of the gloomy news items about smoking. And the authorities involved, all the official authorities and all the petty little ones, fully expected that the shrinking number would continue to shrink.
Then things changed unexpectedly.
I asked a great many people about the negative news regarding smoking and found that the majority (smokers and nonsmokers alike) did not believe most reports about smoking.
However, the disbelief of the average adult (again, smoker or nonsmoker) is of no importance whatsoever when compared to the disbelief of the average teenager. There is no age group on the whole planet that smells a rat as quickly as they do. This group of disbelievers is far more important than any other group, because the teenage years are where nearly all smokers begin smoking. That has been an unswerving reality for a very long time.
That CENTER FOR DISEASE CONTROL 1991 survey, as was mentioned before, changed everything. Prior to then, there had been a predictable twenty-five year decline in the number of smokers. It then rose two-tenths of a percent above the previous year.
Why?
The militant nonsmoker who is employed by the media or some government organization, must face reality: if he (or she) is having a problem getting the average smoker (and the average nonsmoker) to believe some of the things he reports, he is assuredly not believed at all by the average teenager. That CDC survey also found that THIRTY-TWO PERCENT of teenagers had become established smokers by their senior year in high school.
As a smoker, I’m not particularly happy about this. I’m especially unhappy because I understand the main reason behind it, a reason that has entirely bypassed the sensibilities of the militant nonsmoker.
There is one fact that has been reported again and again (and then some) throughout the media and is frequently, authoritatively reported on street corners, at the entrance to every store, in private homes scattered about in the USA. Like the much-lauded statistical evidence against smoking, this fact is indeed “everywhere.”
***If you smoke, you can stop it. Right now. Stop doing that this minute. Quit. Or, in the words of Nike, “Just Do It.”***
This is said repeatedly by militant nonsmokers, in spite of the reality that the vast majority of smokers answer all surveys, “I’d quit in a minute if I felt I could;” in spite of the reality of the militant’s own statistics, that hundreds of thousands of people die every year because they could not just quit smoking. The militant nonsmoker seems to honestly expect us to believe all these victims went to their graves because they were self-indulgent. (Oh, spare me the logic that drew this conclusion!)
And so the percentage of smokers began its upward climb again.
There must have been hundreds of thousands of people (teenagers) who began smoking around that time to make the numbers jump like that. In an effort to understand the jump, I ran my own survey of teens. Unlike the CDC’s survey, mine was highly unscientific. I found groups of teens hanging around pizza parlors, gaming centers, inside or outside malls. They always looked to me like brightly-colored flocks of birds, dressed in the wildest color combinations. They all radiated health and confidence. And the majority of them were smoking. (Maybe it’s the smoking teens who frequent such places; as I said, it wasn’t a scientific survey.)
In many ways, teens are the quintessential age-ists. Every time I tried to communicate with a group of them, I had to convince at least one or two of them that I wasn’t there to preach, but to listen. It was a hard argument every single time. (Who taught them--and they all seem to know it--who taught them that everyone older than they are is a preacher of one sort or another? Who taught them that?)
Late in my listening, I would risk trying to tell them that many people found quitting quite impossible, and that many of those people died. Then I would receive the assurance that she (or he) wouldn’t be one of those; no way, not a chance, etc. And every time (every damn time!) I would find myself looking into the face of a young healthy adult who knew that the moon is not made of green cheese, babies do not come from cabbage patches and she (or he) is not one of those who can’t quit. It unnerved me. They always closed with the same line:
“Everyone says I can just quit if there’s a problem.”
After awhile, on my fourth or fifth group, I risked backing him (or her) into a verbal corner on that pointed possibility. When he would reach the metaphorical wall with his back, he would begin coming back at me in complete certainty that I was wrong. Why? Because “Everyone knows that if smoking becomes a problem for you, why, you can just quit. Everybody knows that!”
One teenager told me firmly, with a confidence that rattled my soul, that the only smokers who can’t quit are “the wimps,” and she wasn’t a wimp.
These declarations were always followed by the defiant lighting of a cigarette, an unconscious reaction to the spurs of her monkey, who didn’t like to hear all this talk of quitting. It didn’t make me feel in the least triumphant to know that I was talking to someone who might be devastatingly wrong in her perceptions of herself. Instead, it made me hope she was right.
|