Stroking The Empathy Gland
Over in today’s Theo, they stroke your empathy gland by using bits of Randy Leonard’s life story to sell his proposed ban on smoking in all areas of city parks and his intention to ban smoking on all sidewalks as well.
It’s the typical deal. Fill coverage of smoking ban proposals with elements that are irrelevant to public policy. Stroke the reader’s empathy gland through personal life stories, toss in a few “scenes of horror” that have nothing to do with smoking in public, and your newspaper, through what ostensibly is meant to be a news story, has successfully helped shape people’s opinions and yet completely ignored the public policy discussion.
As I’ve repeatedly said here and elsewhere, I am a smoker who isn’t an asshole about his smoking and yet knows full well that there are smokers who are assholes about their smoking. It doesn’t matter to me if I can’t smoke in bus shelters (which I never did anyway) or in the vicinity of children’s playgrounds (which I never did anyway).
But a complete ban on smoking in public has nothing do with public policy and everything to do with public officials going on self-appointed moral crusades against habits and vices of which they don’t approve.
While people like Leonard are quite keen on tossing around pithy statements — “Your rights end where my nose begins” — the reality is that the occasional passing on the sidewalk of a smoker or two a couple of times a day isn’t going to kill you from second-hand smoke. Standing at a non-smoking bus stop at a busy intersection right next to several dozen cars idling at the stoplight is pumping more noxious crap into your lungs than I am when I pass you for one and a half seconds on the street.
The reality is that passing an infinite number of bans on smoking isn’t going to suddenly end smoking.
It’s all well and clever for Theo to pass along Leonard’s story of being a firefighter and finding “a man dead from coughing up tissue from his lungs” with an ashtray next to his bed — except for the fact that it has no bearing whatsoever on the public policy debate over smoking in public places. In fact, the only thing it does is allow people to mistake their own personal revulsion for matters requiring the attention of public policy.
Maybe it’s just me, but helping to engender an over-emotional and under-rational understanding of what public policy is for, and what public policy debates should look like, isn’t something on which either elected officials or newspapers of record should be spending their precious time.
Addendum: A couple of clarifying points or reiterations. My point is that there are two issues at hand here. Obviously, one is the question of smoking in public. But the other is how the public policy debate over that question is being conducted.
To drone on about men dying from coughing up bits of their own lungs while an ashtray sits next to their beds informs no one about the question of smoking in public. The only thing it does is stoke the flames of people’s personal distaste for smoking until they become a self-righteous mob muttering, “Furor, furor, furor, furor!”
That only serves to drown out, shut out, and head off a public policy debate. It does nothing at all to foster one.
One other matter. Let’s take this to the logical conclusion. First, we’ll have Leonard baning all smoking in public parks. Then, he’ll ban it on the public sidewalks. Then, he’ll ban it within 25 feet of public sidewalks, making is illegal to smoke on the front porch of your house or the front stoop of your apartment building. Smokers will be left to smoke only inside their own homes.
I’m betting most people don’t see what I’m getting at, so I’ll spell out how this illustrates yet another emotionally-charged sleight of hand on Leonard’s part. According to Theo, Leonard’s crusade is motivated in part by his “more than two decades of putting out cigarette-ignited fires”.
Well, maybe he can explain something to us: If you ban smoking in all public places, leaving smokers no place in the world to smoke except inside their own homes, how many more cigarette-ignited fires do you think your fellow firefighters will have to put out?
The point, ultimately, is this: You want to have a public policy debate on smoking in public? Fine. Let’s have that debate. But that means you don’t get to stroke the empathy gland, the sympathy gland, the self-righteousness gland, or the personal revulsion gland.
Debate the issues of smoking in public. Don’t just fire everyone up into an emotional furor using stories that have no bearing on the issue of smoking in public and then sit down thinking you’ve done good works. Using sleight of hand to undermine an actual public policy debate should never be considered good works for a public official.
January 9th, 2007 at 11:36 am
It seems to me that the public policy debate is very much related to how that public policy affects the health of individuals of that public. Granted, gas fumes are also unhealthy. But that’s another public policy debate issue.
Cigarette smoke is both noxiously harmful and noxiously distasteful to smell. Smokers do get used it it. You can get used to living next to the smell of a garbage dump.
Many health establishments ban people from wearing strong perfumes. The sense of smell is very sensitive in most people, especially non-smokers. Personally, cigarette smoke makes me nauseous and makes my sinuses swell. So does strong perfume. But at least strong perfume is not toxic to lungs. And it doesn’t do damage to brain cells, as nicotine does. And it’s not addictive, either. And it’s easy to embarrass someone wearing such perfume by muttering something about it loud enough for them to hear. Not so, however, with smokers.
There is currently a public “cultural” outcry against smoking by non-smokers for good reasons. Not the least of which are health related. If it takes pushing the empathy button or striking fear into the hearts of those too stubborn and/or addicted to nicotine to break the habit, then I say go for it. .
Yes, it should be that anyone who wants to damage themselves by smoking should do it in the privacy of their own homes. That way they don’t wind up being role models for kids and they don’t befoul my air space any more than I already have to deal with.
And if the public pressure gets so bad that they quit, all the better for them. And their families. And the public.
We ban spitting on the sidewalk. And littering. Why not ban public smoking.
January 9th, 2007 at 7:16 pm
That someone finds the smell of smoke “noxious” isn’t a public policy issue.
Neither is the fact that “health establishments ban people from wearing strong perfumes” relevant at all to a debate over smoking cigarettes in public.
That a child might see a smoker isn’t a public policy issue either (if it is, we might as well ban all the other potential dangerous or offensive things children might see).
The problem here is that the very same people who get their knickers in a bunch when, say, Republicans use the tactic of pushing loaded emotional buttons in order to advance their agenda are the same ones who are fine with that tactic if it’s coming from politicians with whom they agree, in advance of a cause which they support.
But, speaking of noxious, what’s noxious there isn’t just whatever agenda is being advanced, it’s the manner in which it’s being advanced. Scare tactics and emotional smokescreens aren’t the way to conduct public policy debates.