Total Motorcycle Community Forums

Trust me on this, don't get blues going on smoking...

sv-wolf wrote:LOL! Is that a threat blues??????????

Is this another side of you we are beginning to see?

Any comments, doc! (Me - I can play dirty too!)

I am a militant anti-smoker/anti smoking proponent. If I were to say what I really think about smokers, I would be flamed so bad, I would probably be able to feel the heat from Texas to here.

Even considerate smokers?

Back WHEN I smoked, I worked hard to make sure others were comfortable and realized it was my adiction and habit, no one else's

I just wish we cigar smokers weren't corralled with dirty, evil cigarette smokers. Alas, it's nothing but a pipe dream.

If blues won't get going then perhaps I will. I haven't sounded off about this for years so maybe it's time for a rant.

I'm a non-smoker and like blues I'm also allergic to cigarette smoke. Five minutes in a smoky room and my lungs feel like sandpaper; ten minutes and I feel like I'm breathing thick engine oil; any longer and I can't breathe at all. Even a whiff of the stuff and the lining of my nose begins to feel as though it is going to tear appart.

My emotional reaction to smokers is agressive. I get annoyed, for example, when a smoker can't walk the twenty yards of the covered walkway leading from my local station and get into the open air before lighting up. In that twenty yards my air passages have already started to sting and they will stay stinging for half-an-hour afterwards, sometimes a lot longer.

I don't like being around smokers much either, because even when they are not smoking they tend to stink of old tobacco, sometimes to the point of making me feel sick. And if I am totally honest, I do find smoking pretty disgusting.

Those are my emotional reactions. But thirty years ago I did smoke myself for a couple of years. And I remember how much it became part of my persona and how hard it was for me to give up once the allergy began to bite. I remember, too, how unaware I was of the affect my habit was having on other people around me. Occasionally when challenged, I got very defensive about it. So I try to keep things in perspective and remember that most of the time it's the smoking that is the problem not the smoker. Unless someone is being particularly insensitive I do tend to treat it as a problem for me to manage.

I can't help my emotional reactions, though (for years cigarette smoke almost destroyed my social life and gave me endless discomfort.) So sometimes - very rarely, but sometimes - I just give in to my feelings about it and lay into people. I've occasionally been known to tell strangers what I think of their habit or tell people I know that I don't like being around them because I can't bear the way they smell. I suspect that most of the time they think I'm just being ridiculous or censorious or tight-arsed about this. I think that is partly because they have no idea of the devastating effect their habit can have on people like myself.

I have always found this a hard one to handle, though, because I'm always caught between my own needs and feeling, and the realisation that most of the time smokers are just meeting their needs too and don't intend to give offence.

I cannot tell you how much the no-smoking laws have done to improve the quality of my life.

Sounds to me your views have been skewed by a hypersensitivity to smoke and have met many jerkbag smokers. I fully respect the right of someone to not have to be around my second hand smoke, but I'll be damned if I'll support their right to outright ban it.

Now back to your regularly schedule alcohol thread.

Skier, smokers and non-smokers share the common air and there is always a need for negotiation and a need to understand each other.

The idea that my views 'have been skewed' as a result of a 'hypersensitivity' is just a way of avoiding real engagement with the problem and I resent its implications. My views emerge directly out of my experience within the community and out my right to assert and exercise my needs as a member of that community. There is nothing skewed about them. They just view the situation from a different vantage point to your own.

To describe an allergy as a 'hypersensitivity' also carries the suggestion that it is somehow 'excessive' or abnormal and can therefore be dismissed. Language of this kind is often used to marginalise views or perspectives that people find uncomfortable or which threaten them in some way. Allergic reactions, like so many other conditions, are a normal and common part of the human condition, as normal and as common as any other variation in human responses to the environment.

Your hurry to return the thread to the subject of alcohol, suggests the same defensiveness and need for avoidance. I think this is a real issue and needs to be addressed in an honest way.

I'm sure none of this was in your mind when you wrote so I'm not intending this to be a personal attack, but your words do exemplify a common respose by smokers to this issue and I'm responding to a whole history of comments of this kind.

And I have no wish to deny your right to smoke if you want to, though I certainly have no regrets about the banning of smoking in public places here in the UK and in much of the rest of Europe.

Skier wrote:I just wish we cigar smokers weren't corralled with dirty, evil cigarette smokers. Alas, it's nothing but a pipe dream.

Cigars......smell even worse than cigarettes.

As suggested a couple of times.....I started a separate smoking thread. I suspect it will garner much dialogue.