Smoke and Mirrors

I remember, 45 or 50 years ago, going to the grocery store with my mother and sister. Up and down the aisles we went, my mother trying to fend off our non-stop requests for cinnamon sugar Pop Tarts and the like. As we shopped, my mother smoked. That's right, she smoked in the grocery store, crushing each spent cigarette beneath her foot on the linoleum floor in aisle 3 or 5. She wasn't alone. A lot of people smoked in the grocery store. In fact, I still have nightmares about women pushing grocery carts, their hair "put up" in wire rollers, cigarettes dangling from their lips as they fished cold cuts from the refrigerator case.

I remember other smoking conventions that now seem hard to believe. I remember smoking sections on airplanes, as if the smoke knew to stop at row 25. I remember smoking being allowed at sporting events, smokers and non-smokers packed in the stands together, smokers holding their cigarettes aloft in an attempt to minimize the bother to others and non-smokers risking furtive glances of displeasure, but saying nothing. Not that long ago people could smoke in the common areas of malls and in movie theater lobbies and in the general seating areas of airports. Allowing smoking in business offices was the rule, not the exception. And when each of these "smoking rights" was lost by legislation or corporate policy, it was met with dismay by smokers. But in each case, within five years or so of the change, smokers and non-smokers alike could hardly believe that the old ways ever prevailed.

Both of my parents smoked, and smoked heavily, all of their adult lives. Both of them also died of lung cancer, my mother two weeks shy of her 60th birthday, my father four and a half months after his 74th. (His mother, my grandmother, lived to be 92 despite her five cigarette a day "habit.") I smoked myself, off and on, and generally on the sly, for almost 30 years; I did this despite years of pleading my parents to quit, years of being car sick in the backseat as my parents smoked in the front, and years of hating that my Mom smelled like smoke when she kissed me goodnight when I was a child. I did it even after my mother died of lung cancer. Our family relationship with smoking was complex, its hold on my body and psyche strong. My Mom smoked, at least some, when she carried my sister and me in pregnancy. My six pound two ounce full-term birth weight (despite my 22 inch length) gives proof to my very earliest relationship with nicotine. Smoking was literally and figuratively "in my blood," as they say.

This past week Michigan became the 38th state in the nation to ban smoking in workplaces, which of course include restaurants and bars. The battle to achieve this legislative milestone has been hard fought and long. "Big Tobacco" has poured a lot of money into the battle and done its best to couch the issue as one of libertarian rights: Big Tobacco's spoilsport cousin, Big Government, telling all the boys and girls how to live their lives. My mother would have been hopping mad at this legislation, as she was at earlier restrictions, and would have very vocally opposed it. Her passion is carried on by other smokers, including one theater-Facebook friend of mine who feels, I think, singled out and unfairly discriminated against. "People eat fast food and drink liquor and do a host of other things that give them a greater risk of dying - why is it okay to take my rights away and not theirs?"

I don't think that this legislation is primarily about taking the rights of smokers away. It's about balancing the rights of smokers with the rights of those who serve them or work with them in the workplace. As a consumer I have a right to not frequent a business where the atmosphere is too smoky. In fact, I haven't gone to a local blues bar, the Green Door, for years for just this reason. But it is a little too cute to dismiss waiters and waitresses or others who are forced to work in a smoky environment and breathe second hand smoke with the sentiment, "They don't have to work there. They can get a job somewhere else." Well, maybe they can't. And maybe they shouldn't have to. Sometimes the rights of individuals conflict with the rights of others, and the conflict must be resolved.

Times change, social conventions change, and approaches toward resolving conflicting interests change. I feel for my smoker friends and I acknowledge their right to smoke, at least where their smoking does not harm others. I acknowledge this even as I pray that they will look through the smoke into the mirrors of their psyches and examine their own complex relationships to the practice. I have no right to judge them, but I have every right to love them and to hope that they will be my friends for a long time.