It’s strange that tobacco users are the most common target of those do-gooders who mean to improve the lives of addicts and other risk-takers in our society.
Looking across our pages, this newspaper has printed three more letters from a junior high class about healthy living. Targeted in those letters are smoking and obesity, both good causes. They give us the contemporary line attempting to convince us not to smoke, to live healthy.
That line basically says that smoking is bad and causes cancer, killing people. They ask why anyone would do such a thing, taking such an enormous risk.
As a smoker, I even applaud their efforts to promote non-smoking among their peers and among adults.
What’s at stake is so much more. One asks, on the issue of obesity, why someone doesn’t do something about the ever-increasing problem.
The fact is, just like with cigarettes, they are. Fat people are suing fast food chains just as smokers and states have sued tobacco companies and won gargantuan settlements. It’s only a matter of time before “junk food” becomes a target of the confiscatory taxes “we the sheeple” have placed on cigarettes.
More people want to do something about stopping some of us, adults responsible for our own lives, from our self-destructive behavior. The same could be said for every Marxist failure in our 20th-century history books.
Forget cigarettes and obesity for awhile.
Consider for a moment the right to free assembly in a church, outlined in the constitution’s first amendment. Marx and failed Marxist societies were famously anti-religious, and they took measures to stop religion’s influence in their cultures. The same lines of thinking have existed as long within these United States.
The reasoning is even obvious. Religion is destructive. A friend of mine, in debating my own religious beliefs, suggests to me that more people have died to religious causes than any other cause. He may be right. I don’t know about the numbers, but religion has certainly been behind a multitude of deaths.
Religion, some contend, leads most of its adherents to unquestioningly following the dictates of their church. Indeed, some of the destruction caused in the name of religion must arise from blind faith.
It also leads to individuals who are weak-minded and apathetic toward temporal issues, such as their political leaders, or when active to advocate state-sponsored destruction of freedom, such as banning alcohol or censorship.
The case for suppressing religion can be strong without even bothering to look at radical Islam. Fortunately, while many inroads have been against religious freedom, those who would banish religion completely remain on the elitist fringe; and religion remains largely free.
Religious freedom correlates strongly with the issues on cigarettes and eating.
The responsibility for choosing or disregarding any of the three falls to one person alone, one individual who has the right to pursue happiness. That right only disappears when the activity harms another.
Religion has come with a gun throughout much of history. That’s not right. Second-hand smoke causes health problems for other individuals, and it’s not right when it is forced on another person. I fail to see how someone’s obesity is particularly harmful to another person unless the obese person sits on someone. That of course would be wrong, especially if there were flatulence involved.
There is no harm in evangelism. The only harm may fall upon the individual who gets cancer, gets fat or ends up in the flames of hell — Those are the consequences of wrong choices in these matters (of course the consequence for bring wrong on religion varies wildly).
There is no harm in encouraging someone to quit smoking or overeating. There is no harm in attempting to convert another person to a specific religion.
As we conduct our campaigns against unhealthy habits, we must remember that the decisions to engage in unhealthy activities, like smoking or overeating, are made by individuals. They must deal with the consequences alone.
Those consequences can be high enough without societal interference, such as the cigarette tax. We need to remember the ideals in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. That means that if the consequences hurt only the individual, it’s fair game to talk about it and exchange ideas (and this junior high class should be commended for doing such), but no one needs to do anything about it.
Taco Bell didn’t cause obesity. Corporate deception on addiction didn’t cause anyone to ignore the risk and smoke anyway. Neither the Pope nor Billy Graham force anyone to believe or attend their churches.
Another person’s obesity is not my problem. My weight is. Someone’s smoking is not my problem. Mine is. My religion is not my problem. Mine is, and no one needs to do anything about my problems but me and those whom I choose to include.
Personal, individual responsibility is the issue. To do anything as a society is an attack on personal responsibility for an individual’s actions. It is assault on the old idea that decisions have consequences; instead, the state or society protects individuals from their own negative consequences through limits on liberty whether limiting smoking, overeating or religion.