uite a few citizens attended a hearing at Carney Hospital last week to promote the admirable idea that it is simply not enough to save a few whales. We must, if we are civilized, save people, too, and where better to begin the battle than inside every restaurant in Boston.
Anyplace where these filthy, evil smokers eat. If we could eliminate cigarettes, everybody would be smarter, healthier, more affluent, less violent, and probably better-looking.
Even more are expected at a session scheduled Thursday at Boston Medical Center. The pep rallies are held at hospitals so doctors and researchers can show scary slides of lungs that resemble the black hole of Calcutta to reinforce the obvious: Smoking is bad, and then you die.
Of course, the pathetic minority addicted to tobacco has been demonized by a politically correct culture that penalizes restaurants selling cigarettes yet encourages them to dispense condoms. So it is now easier to find a place to have safe sex than to locate a corner to smoke a Salem.
Irony abounds: Smokers get stigmatized. The poor things also get less compassion than crack addicts or welfare cheats.
The only place left to light up is in France. As a result, smokers pace outside office buildings like POWs or inmates at a maximum-security facility, allowed a 10-minute break, once a day, a Marlboro cuffed in frozen fingers as stronger, better human beings sneer at their visible weakness.
The hearings hope to drum up support for an ordinance to ban smoking in any restaurant with 20 or more seats. Places with fewer than 20 seats are called kitchens.
On the same day this smoking hearing is held, there will be another hearing - a parole hearing - for Katherine Ann Power, a woman involved in the murder of a city policeman. Guess which hearing will be better attended.
The antismoking lobby is huge. And the cigarette industry - full of proven liars as well as being a health menace - is a terrific enemy for all these state attorneys general trying to convince voters that billions will be tossed into the laps of taxpayers as a result of their litigation.
However, it's weird to realize more people show up for a smoking-ban meeting than appear for parent-teacher nights at public schools. Tell voters it's about tobacco and they arrive in droves; tell them it's about registering convicted perverts and they stay home to watch TV.
It is also mystifying how some of the same politicians who scream about the threat to health and life posed by cigarettes turn around and endorse partial-birth abortion as well as the sensible notion that women have a right to decide what's best for their own bodies. Go figure!
Under the proposed ordinance, smoking sections would be allowed in restaurants where a floor-to-ceiling Berlin Wall is built to segregate degenerate smokers from the rest of the pack. The city would then empower a roving team of Smoke Police, aka Butt Cops, to monitor adherence to the regulation.
My friend Mark Manning, owner of my favorite neighborhood restaurant, The Stockyard in Brighton, just spent $12,000 installing smoke-eating machines around his restaurant's bar. It took him two years to obtain permission to build an addition, but now it's going to take only two months to pass an ordinance that will economically crush more than a few.
Maybe there are still a few people left who don't know that cigarettes are bad and lung cancer is worse. But - like gambling, the lottery and booze - some things are simply beyond legislative control, and human nature, with all its varied appetites, happens to be among them.
How about secondhand smoke? the zealots cry. Yet, how about free will or an individual's right to leave, or, better, not to patronize places with smoking sections? And if secondhand smoke is such a huge threat, explain why more aren't dead at the foot of the Broadway Bridge in South Boston where you can actually weigh the daily dosage of exhaust and chemicals hanging in the air. Despite well-intentioned propaganda, the chances of croaking because you sat 75 feet from the Marlboro Man are less than getting hit by a drunk driver.
Good government is one thing. Nobody opposes public health. But acting like a total busybody is a whole other story, and why stop at cigarettes? Why not insist there be mandatory aerobic workouts in any establishment selling pizza or pushing cholesterol on unsuspecting consumers?
Today, it's smoke. Tomorrow, red meat.
