Continuing with the Thanksgiving/Good New Days series, today (and every day) I am thankful for smoke-free restaurants, homes, airplanes, offices, grocery stores, and even bowling alleys! This is a societal sea-change that is most definitely for the better.
You youngsters simply cannot imagine what it was like.
Smoking was everywhere. Not that you would have noticed, because you probably would have grown up with one or both parents smoking in your home. Even the rare families with no smokers owned ashtrays and allowed visiting friends to smoke; the social pressure to do so must have been tremendous.
At work, at play, in the theater, at a restaurant, on a bus, on a plane, in the hospital. There was no escape.
Outdoors was the best place for breathing, if there weren't too many other people around. School was relatively safe, if you stayed away from the teachers’ lounge and could get through the day without needing to use the bathroom.
Even our doctor smoked.
Go to college? Your roommate was likely to be a smoker, and that was not considered grounds for requesting a switch.
Get a job? Smoke polluted your air space, unless you were one of the lucky few who shared a room with one of them new-fangled computin’ machines. They were too valuable to be subjected to damaging smoke particles.
Who knows? Maybe it was the increasing use of computers which began to tip the balance in favor of non-smokers. The events did parallel one another. But smoke-free living didn’t just happen: much work, money, and lobbying were poured into this personal environmental cleanup action.
When it comes to tobacco smoke, now is a much better time to be living than 50 or even 25 years ago.
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Category Health The Good New Days
Liz at Smithical has issued a challenge to honor Thanksgiving by blogging about something we're thankful for each day of November. It will be a bit of a trick to accomplish, as I already have more posts in the pipeline than time to work on them, and I hope to liberate myself from my computer for several days this month. But it's a grand idea, so I'm going to plunge in. She didn't say the posts must be long, or profound.
The concept fits nicely with an idea for a post I was in the middle of constructing: The Good New Days.
After more than half a century of observation, it's very easy to be aware of (and complain about) how much society has changed for the worse over the years. I mention examples from time to time (some would say frequently), and it's not just the mutterings of an old curmudgeon: it's true that in many ways we are in bad shape and getting worse.
However, it is equally true that we have made significant gains, and some things are much, much better than they were. I'll attempt to mention one of these for each day of November, both to encourage myself and to warn the next generations not to take the improvements for granted. Without vigilance, what has been won can often be lost.
To begin: I'm thankful to be living now. I've often expressed the opinion that I was born too late, that I belong in an earlier era. But truthfully, if I belong then, I would have been living then. This is the day that the Lord hath made for me.
Besides, I've seen the toilet facilities in those medieval castles.
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Category The Good New Days
