Smoking or Non?

I am a smoker....a cigarette smoker that is. I don't smoke as much as I used to but I still smoke. I don't smoke around the kids and I smoke outside my house when I do smoke at home so that is not a problem. I am used to that.

In accordance with a new city ordinance, my workplace is now non-smoking as well. All non-smoking. It is taking its toll on our business for the moment but I am sure that will be only temporary. People will get used to it and I don't really have a problem with that part of it. This is the part I have a problem with: we have a break area for (smoking) employees in the kitchen by the office (about 30 feet away from any food prep areas). Non-smoking employees have always been allowed to sit out in the dining room on their breaks and that has never been a problem for me either. I don't really want my non-smoking customers to see me smoking either. (Just a politeness thing I guess)

However, according to this new ordinance, smoking employees will have to smoke outside, 25 feet away from the building. This is where I have a small issue. During the daytime hours, even during the early evening hours, this is perfectly fine. But I work from 10 pm until 6 am. Which means if I want a cigarette at 3 in the morning, I have to go out the back door, walk to the dumpster and smoke in the middle of the night....alone. Now this does not seem to be an even reasonably safe practice in my opinion. I know a lot of the more militant non-smokers will say "well, quit smoking then". And yes, for my health's sake I probably should. But shouldn't that be my decision and not local government's? If I am not anywhere in the vicinity of non-smokers (so that I am not infecting them with my second-hand smoke), if I am in the break room in the back of the house, nowhere near customers or food handling areas...then what is really the point? It's not the fact that I would be annoying customers, or endangering them. It is simply, in my opinion, (my opinion only) another way of the government attempting to make the general population cow to their wishes. It is an attempt by our government to regulate my personal actions.

Now, please don't take me the wrong way. I know that smoking is unhealthy and I would not jeopardize anyone else's health by smoking around them, and I know that not everyone is polite with their bad habits and we have to have some sort of rules or else people would do whatever they wanted whenever they wanted. However, the issue here really isn't about smoking. It is about the systematic stripping away of our personal freedoms. You can't smoke here today......you can't eat beef jerky tomorrow. You can't eat beef jerky tomorrow and next month you can't marry the man you are in love with because you might not produce aesthecially pleasing children. Think that you reallllly have freedom of speech? Not with the Echelon system firmly in place you don't. You think that the government doesn't know more about your life than you do? Think twice.

To most people this post may sound like the ramblings of a paranoid individual. Not so. If I were paranoid, I would think that everyone was out to get me. As it is now, I have a lot more trust in a stranger on the street than I do my own government. They are already in our workplaces, our streetlights, our computer systems and who knows where else. Where does it end? Does it end when OUR government bans lip synching or tells us we can only have two children per household? We are supposed to be the best government in the world, the model of democracy....a government by the people and for the people, not exclusively for a bunch of old, rich white guys in Washington.

Before I get slammed with a lot of those "you are anti-American" comments, let me make one thing perfectly clear. I love my country. I LOVE MY COUNTRY. It is the best country in the world, bar none. It's our government that I hate. So my mayor can put that in her pipe and smoke it....outside by the dumpster with me.

Peace alllll..........