Shut Up And Listen 103

Fuck Smokers
I’m going to do something in this column that I don’t often do. Hell, something I rarely do. So enjoy it because I don’t know when it will come again. Ready?
	I was wrong.
	Back whenever I said it, I said I didn’t support the ban of smoking inside of restaurants and bars I was wrong and it was dumb of me to say. I realised this sometime between then and now, I don’t know exactly when. I don’t keep track of things like that; few do. 
	I do know it was before they banned smoking in bars here in London, which was a few weeks back. They did in restaurants a while before that. Nice to see the City Council has the stones to do something good. And this was good, believe me.
	Of course, the proprietors of the establishments who would be affected complained and made a lot of noise about losing business and lack of freedom and all that shit. Here it is weeks later and I haven’t heard anything from them since about three days after it happened. That’s how much effect it’s had.
	Odds are, their business went down a little. Not the exorbitant amount that they predicted. Sure, they were yelling doomsday down in City Hall. “Oh, Mayor, don’t ban the smoking, because then the smokers won’t leave their houses and will just drink there! If that happens, my bar will close and then my little baby girl won’t be able to get new clothes and we’ll have to live in a box in an alley with only the money I make giving blowjobs to Council members to buy bread!” Shit like that. 
	They wanted to be able to create smoking rooms with private ventilation and such. What they didn’t tell you is that well, most bars in London couldn’t afford to build a proper smoking room. A proper one costs at least ten thousand dollars minimum, often running much higher. Most bars couldn’t afford that, so it would only benefit the best of the best and would fuck over the little bars (of course, the little bars didn’t seem to notice that).
	But now we get to the question of questions when talking about this: what about personal freedom? Well, fuck you if your freedom involves killing another person. Banning smoking inside buildings won’t lead to banning meat and chips and pop and anything that’s harmful to a person. It’s not about smokers not being harmed. Hell, most people are with me now and just say, “If they’re dumb enough to do it in this day and age, they get what they get.”
	No, what we want to protect is the health of those smart enough not to smoke. Me eating a hamburger doesn’t clog the arteries of the women sitting at the table next to me. Some jackass smoking does poison the lungs of the innocent person at the table next to him. That’s what we’re banning here. That’s where I went wrong. I was thinking about it wrong back then. I was in the “slippery slope” group. Fuck that group if it can’t figure it out.
	The only bad thing about the smoking bans are the people in front of the doors. You know these people. The smokers who have to stand RIGHT in front of the door to smoke because they can’t be bothered to walk ten metres out of the way to a spot where people don’t walk through the smokey cloud. Honestly, we need a new law that restricts how close a smoking person can be to a door or walkway. Yes, I am saying outside in the so-called fresh air, there should be restrictions where a person can or cannot smoke. Fuck the smokers. Fuck them hard. They want to kill themselves, fine. But fuck them if they want to inflict that upon anyone else because they can’t walk twenty metres. I don’t care if it’s cold. I don’t care if it’s raining. I don’t care if it’s burning hot. You smoke; you don’t inflict it upon anyone else but yourself and your fellow smokers.
	People aren’t going to stop smoking, but we can make it so the morons only kill themselves if we stop listening to their whiny, “pity us” cries of so-called oppression. When they can say they’ve never once harmed another living thing with smoke then maybe they can complain about oppression and unfairness, but until then, fuck ‘em.