Safety

 

Published 9/14/06

 

A recent Sun Herald article told of cities in northeast Mississippi that are banning smoking in public places, citing the Surgeon General’s report on secondhand smoke.

 

Such bans are just another example of Americans’ obsession with “safety.”  

 

Everyone living is at risk of death or injury from infinite sources, known and unknown.  Will the passage of a smoking ban, or even a hundred such laws, really make our lives safer?  It seems to me that Americans, with all their worries about “safety,” are giving up their lives in order to preserve them.

 

Now and then I go to a local beer bar.  There is ALWAYS a good deal of smoking there.  So long as the smoke doesn’t irritate me, I stay and enjoy myself, without concern for the “harm” being done to me by “secondhand smoke.”  Why?  Because I know that, between now and the time when I may or may not contract cancer from someone else’s smoking, any number of events may kill me.  And since I don’t waste a moment of my life worrying about THEM, why should I concern myself with a little bit of smoke?

 

In his essay “Circles,” Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, “Geoffrey draws on his boots to go through the woods, that his feet may be safer from the bite of snakes.  Aaron never thinks of such a peril.  In many years neither is harmed by such an accident.  Yet it seems to me that with every precaution you take against such an evil you put yourself into the power of the evil.”

 

I’d rather enjoy a rich, carefree, relatively short life (which requires very little), than live to be 90 and have nothing to show for it but my age.