Smoker's "rights"

Once again I have to wonder, what's the deal with smokers? I was driving by a well known international coffee shop this week and there was a young girl smoking in front of the shop. Apparently she had just sucked the last bits of tar and nicotine out of that bad-boy because as I was driving past she tossed it out into the road. I honked my horn politely, she gave me the finger and I could see that our relationship was coming to an untidy end. I suppose that honestly it was doomed from the start as mixed relationships rarely work out. She was a smoker with the smokers finely honed sense of entitlement ("It is my right to throw my smelly butts all over the place!") and I think that smokers who throw their fag-ends on the ground should be make to clean up dog-poop in the parks with their bare hands.


I am not some sort of anti-smoking zealot. If someone wants to put that poison into their own bodies then that is up to them. Just keep it out of my face and we'll be fine. But why do smokers think they don't have to clean up after themselves? Everybody has seen it; out the rear door of a business there is a "smoker's pit" where the butt-suckers go to indulge their addiction, with a litter of butts laying all over the place along with a couple of quarts of spit. Maybe there's a large coffee can over-flowing with a toxic brew of water and cigarette butts. It's as though smokers don't think their habit is quite gross enough, the have to add a big mess into the mix. And that poisonous brew in the can would be laughable if it weren't so vile. One can imagine some smoker having a fit of cleanliness and putting out a can for butts not realizing that putting out the can isn't even half the job. You have got to replace or at least clean that dude every so often before it fouls up the area even more. In this case, the thought just doesn't count.


I have seen "smokers remorse" and it can be a wonderful thing. I was walking into a local mall when a fellow flicked his butt into the road. "Nice throw," I said, "right into the road." he went over and picked it up then threw it into an ashtray moulded into the top of a nearby garbage can. "Happy?" he asked, sarcastically, I suspect. "Ecstatic," I answered, and I was not being sarcastic. One small victory will do to start.



Anyway... Humouroceros