First Posted: 2/26/2015
Editor’s note: This Optimist column first appeared in the Sunday Dispatch on Aug. 14, 1988. It has been edited for space.
I used to have very little sympathy for smokers. Especially young ones.
I suppose I can understand a guy my father’s age (who, by the way kicked the habit a few years back after smoking for 40 years) having trouble giving up cigarettes simply because they have smoked for so long. After all, these were young men who often took their first puff during World War II when a pack of Luckies came along with their C-rations.
I once saw in a Life magazine from the early ’40s a full page advertisement saying “More Doctors Smoke Camels Than Any Other Cigarette.” Imagine, the medical profession actually endorsing a brand of smokes.
But that was then. This is now.
That was before cigarettes became recognized as “cancer sticks.” Back then, the only drawback was that smoking might “stunt your growth.” And nobody believed that.
So, it’s hard to fault someone who got hooked before the surgeon general’s report and just hasn’t gotten around to quitting yet.
But young people don’t have a leg to stand on. They knew about the cancer side effect in plenty of time to quit. And anyone who starts to smoke today, having full knowledge of what cigarettes will do to your heart and lungs, needs his head examined.
I said I used to have little sympathy for smokers. I changed my tune over the past week. I’ve found, you see, that I have something in common with them.
Why the change of heart? The sun.
While reading the front page of the Philadelphia Inquirer just before heading to the beach on vacation, I noticed a headline I wish I hadn’t: “Good for the soul, bad for the skin: Tans lose their summertime appeal.”
It said: “Statistics show that this year alone, more than a half-million Americans will be diagnosed as having skin cancer.” And guess what’s getting the blame?
It’s not the sun’s fault. We’re the ones who have punched all those holes in the ozone layer, letting the sun’s ultraviolet light get a clear shot at our skins.
The experts are telling us we must learn to forgo a deep, dark tan and become a nation of healthy pale faces.
Aha, I said to myself thinking of the times I’ve chided my smoking friends for not quitting, the day of reckoning has arrived. The article said, “Someday people will generally believe that getting a tan is just like smoking — dumb.”
What did I do?
I relaxed on the sand and looked around at the hundreds of others doing the same thing. There was great comfort in knowing that I wasn’t the only “dumb” person in the world. And certainly not the dumbest, either.
How about all those sunbathers who were smoking at the same time they were frying their bodies? What idiots, I thought, feeling much better about myself.
I suppose it was the same feeling a pack-a-day smoker gets when he meets a two or three-packer.
