So long, smokes: Ban reflects major cultural shift

When I was growing up, you could smoke pretty much anywhere.
Waist-high ashtrays were the norm in lobbies and waiting rooms.
When I went to visit my old man at his workplace, the Bay City Times (he was also a newspaperman; I followed in his inky footsteps), the newsroom was a thick cloud of acrid smoke from reporters and editors puffing away.
Most houses, even if the homeowners didn’t smoke, had ashtrays on coffee tables for when company came over.
Cars were equipped with attached ashtrays and the outlet beneath the radio was for the lighter, not a cell phone charger.
This was in the late 1970s and early 1980s, before the cultural winds began frantically blowing the smoke away.
The slow eradication of tobacco from our lives will go down in history as a major societal shift.
In the 1910s and 1920s, as America was industrialized, smoking a cigarette was one of the few moments of pleasure a factory worker might enjoy during a long, grueling day. The long-term health dangers smoking posed weren’t nearly as threatening as the day-to-day reality of working in dangerous conditions.
In 1965, the peak of smoking, 42 percent of the American population called themselves smokers, according the American Heart Association. This, too, was a different era. Many of the men had started smoking during World War II, when cigarettes were rationed to soldiers. It was also common to see doctors hawking tobacco products on TV and in magazines.
That number has now been cut in half. Currently, about 23 percent of adult men and 19 percent of adult women smoke in America.
Never has a product been so accepted, then so reviled in such an abrupt way.
It isn’t just the adverse health effects: people have known smoking isn’t good for you long before now. Instead, the revulsion our culture feels about smoking reflects our preoccupation with perfection and safety. Those who set the health agenda seem to see America on the path to create the finest human units the world has ever seen. Cigarettes and cheeseburgers are only going to get in the way. You have to make sure your kiddies are wearing bike helmets and knee pads.
Michigan recently joined the growing number of states in having some kind of smoking ban.
While I’m still a little stuck in murky questions regarding civil liberties, the truth is cigarettes not only affect your health, but secondhand smoke is harmful to others. Anyone who tells you different is, well, just blowing smoke.
So, as a smoker myself, I can’t say I applaud the ban, but I understand it and reluctantly admit it’s the right way to go.
Maybe the previously permissive atmosphere legitimized the act of smoking and compelled people like me to start.
Like most smokers, I started in my teens. My friends and I would steal cigarettes from our parents’ packs, go out into a wooded park and smoke to “get a buzz.”
I didn’t smoke habitually until I was in college, where I fancied myself cutting quite the Romantic swath as I pored over the great tomes of American literature, a cigarette in my hand.
Huck Finn smoked a pipe. The Lost Generation writers -- Hemingway, Fitzgerald -- always had cigarettes dangling from their characters’ lips. In later years Hemingway quit because, as he relayed in an interview, it interfered with his sense of smell, which he needed while hunting.
Holden Caulfield huffed and puffed around “The Catcher in the Rye” because he was “a pretty heavy smoker.”
In Jack Keroauc’s “On the Road,” the impoverished, bohemian characters go through ashtrays, collecting the tobacco from butts to roll cigarettes.
But the smoke will clear from books, movies and TV shows as it evaporates in reality. In a few generations, maybe cigarettes will be a historical oddity like snuff. Most likely, tobacco will be outlawed altogether.
My great-great-grandkids will probably read the interactive history websites that have replaced books with wonder and say, “Why would anyone breath in smoke on purpose?”
I just hope my far-off tobacco-less progeny have a firm grasp on their mortality and aren’t presumptuous enough to think they’ll cleverly cheat death.
Yes, that’s right.
Even non-smokers die someday.