New York, Florida and Louisiana? If the do-gooders have their nasty, saccharine way, the land where the good times roll could well become as hostile to personal liberty as the great Yankee fiefdoms of the North and the steaming pile that is the California Republic.
Now that the state legislature has abdicated its regulation of smoking to local municipalities we can all expect the usual worry wart, mothers for decency cretins to be burning the switchboards with frantic calls to save their precious children’s lungs from demon tobacco. And, given the crassness of the average councilman (of which there are far too many for even the satanic tobacco companies, whose smoke, I am sure, light the very fires of hell, to buy off like they could in the state house), we can all expect new regulations to come down the pike.
After all, old Bertram Broussard Boudreaux has to have a platform when he runs for the higher-level feeding trough that is the state house.
Personal liberty has been in retreat in this country since the days of Abraham Lincoln. Occasionally there are victories (for example, I engage in some sodomy tonight, but I had better be sure I don’t smoke in my dorm room afterward), though sometimes those rights seem more imagined than real. For us young scholars though, things have been going backwards rather than forward.
In the ’80s, across this country, smoking in your dorm was banned (mostly because of the hysteria linked to anything pleasurable from the ’70s — i.e. everything from pot to sex), on the rather nebulous grounds, in most cases, that students just weren’t honest enough to admit to their parents that they smoked and wanted to be in a smoking room/dorm. Well, spinelessness has always been the cause of many of our woes (from Prohibition to the Clinton presidency), and seems to have been the beginnings of the slippery slope.
Along the way to the present year of our Lord 2003, we’ve lost our ability to drink legally (a greater contribution to so-called binge drinking than bottomless tequila night) until we reach the arbitrary and meaningless age of 21 (three years after we are able to vote, buy long guns and smoke the dreaded North Carolina weed in a box) — something that is exacerbated in many of our dorms that have declared themselves, like a turn of the century Baptist minister, dry for everyone. We also lost — and, yes, fellow students it once was legal — our right to get high, even though I’ve never seen anyone pass out from too much marijuana.
The way I see the future is a world at war with the minority of us who smoke tobacco, drink anything better than malt liquor and indulge in anything else considered sinful by those who will have their reward in heaven. I look forward to the day in which Twinkies having warning labels, tobacco is illegal and you have to be 25 years old to even sit in a bar (smoke-free of course).
Still, let us enjoy ourselves now. We live in a relatively free state in a relatively free country, where just enough Cajun and rebel spirit survive to preserve, if only in amber, a memory of good times and the camaraderie shared over a smoke or a drink. Perhaps it is the remembrance of our past alone that will preserve us through the shameful attempts to foist a northern, puritanical outlook on the people of the Pelican State.