No Cigar Smokers Allowed!
It’s just a cold, hard truth of life. One of the things we love to do, smoke cigars, is banned most places we go. Our cigars just are not allowed.
Restaurants. Once there was once a time when we could have a nice meal, drink some wine, and then have a cigar after dinner. Some places actually had humidors on site for you to pick from. While I assume that there are still places like this (know of any?) the norm today is for restaurants to just ban cigar smoking.
Bars. This one is the most troubling for me. Drinking and smoking go hand in hand. I’ll have some Wild Turkey and I just automatically go for a cigar. Not any more. You go out and all you can do at a bar is shoot pool, talk, our listen to crappy music someone else picked out.
Car. I live in California, so this may not be the case for you. But if I were to be driving with a minor, someone under 18, I would be pulled over by the cops. It is illegal to smoke with your own kid in the back seat! (I don’t have kids so I haven’t ran into this problem… yet.)
Any Building. It’s not just in the building but, where I am going to school, Cal State Fullerton for my MBA, you cannot smoke within 20 feet of a building. I guess smoke is considered akin to a heat seeking missile looking for its next victim.
What all of these places have in common is that they were legislated into this madness. The government decided that having a little secondhand smoke was just too much of a risk for innocent passersbys. This is so much crap.
Does secondhand smoke kill? Sure. If you have a cloud of smoke circling around you 24/7 for forty years, it will kill you – we are told. I’ve been around secondhand smoke my whole life and I was able to play sports. I don’t have any health problems at all. I’m still alive.
I do have to admit, however, that secondhand smoke probably does have some adverse affects. What about car exhaust?
This is where the “ban smoking” argument crumbles. According to our alarmist government and every other international and intergovernmental organization, our world is coming to a quick end because of car exhaust and other carbon emitters. Now, I don’t know about you, but wouldn’t the end of humanity trump secondhand smoke? But cars and other polluters are allowed to go on. Why not us?
These jerks in government just hate you and I and they want to regulate our pastime out of existence. Before that time happens, however, they will just try to tax us to death. Our friends who smoke cigarettes know all about that and we came perilously close to succumbing to their same fate with SCHIP. How many of us would have had to stop enjoying cigars if that tax hike had passed? Most all of us would have had to cut back at least.
Alright, that’s our friendly government at work but there is one other place most of us can’t smoke. I bet you thought I had forgotten about this one.
Home. Home may be where the heart is but no smoke can be found there. We are booted out into the frequently inhospitable outdoors to smoke our cigars. While the weather is usually good to me it is not so kind to many of you.
And maybe this represents the crux of our ostracism. If we cannot smoke at home how can we expect to be allowed to smoke outside of the home? To put it another way, if we cannot get those who love us to permit our indoor cigar smoking how can we convince those who do not know us? We can’t.
What all of this is leading to is a generation of cigar smokers, you and me, out in the wilderness. We are heading for a day when we are going to have to get our cigars delivered to us in nondescript bags, just like those guys who get playboy in manila folders. Basically, we are lepers.
I am usually an optimistic person. I still hold out hope that one day I will be allowed to take my Fuentes out into public and smoke them amongst the people. But, from where I sit today, I just don’t see that day being anytime soon. Do you?
