I don’t smoke, never have. Oh, when I was a teenager, I would sneak an occasional cigarette, but I never did start doing it regular. Many of the people I grew up with and around, including many of my relatives, were smokers. Many of my best friends have been smokers. It has always seemed to me that smokers were happy, easygoing people. When I was young smoking was all right; in fact it was socially cool. The Surgeon General came out with some stuff about it being bad, but nobody much cared about that. Over the years, smoking has fell from grace. Now, smokers are a pariah. With all the health concerns that have been raised over the years, I can understand people not smoking. What I have trouble understanding is people who don’t smoke and seemingly despise smokers. These people, some of them former smokers themselves, speak of smokers as if they were some lower order animal. Why is that?
Well, there is a thing called genetic predisposition that seems to have a lot of affect on how we develop and behave. I have a theory. I believe that some people, maybe even many people, have what I will call an “antagonistic gene.” These are the people who are always talking about “us and them.” “Us” being the group they are including themselves with and “them” being the enemy. Back when I was young there were groups that many people spoke of as “them.” Inclusion in the “them” groups often had to do with nationality, race, religion or sexual preference. It has become socially unacceptable and politically incorrect to denounce most of those groups. In fact one might be accused of hate speech for merely criticizing one of the former “them” groups. I am sure that this is a frustrating circumstance for the “us” folks. I think that many of the “us” folks that don’t smoke have substituted smokers as one of their new “them” groups. As for me, I probably have a touch of the antagonistic gene myself, but I will limit my “them”groups to politicians, government officials and their like and leave my smoking friends alone.
