RING OF FIRE: SOME THOUGHTS ON MY SMOKE-FILLED YOUTH

I stepped out of my car in a parking lot yesterday and walked straight into a cloud of cigarette smoke.  I nearly gagged, although the smoking culprit was a car's-length away.  It amazes me that cigarette smoke affects me so, given that I grew up in a haze of the stuff.  My father chain smoked--lit one from another from the time he woke up until the time he went to sleep.   And in those days - the 1950s and ‘60s - he and everyone else smoked inside the house. We had a small home, which means I effectively smoked until my father quit cold-turkey when I was fifteen.  

And people didn’t just smoke at home.  They smoked in their cars.  And at work. And on airplanes. And anywhere else they damn well pleased.  (Sure, airborne smokers were eventually confined to the back of the plane, but, come on, there wasn’t a plexiglass divider.)

Kids these days nag their parents to quit.  This never crossed my mind.  Almost everybody's dad (and some of the moms) smoked.  Most homes had pedestal ashtrays – tall brass affairs that cradled shallow glass bowls.  Then there were the DIY ashtrays that I crafted during my New Jersey childhood.  I would collect large seashells when we went “down the shore,” and color them with crayons, before proudly presenting them to my father to use as receptacles for his cigarette butts.  

I am sure my hair and clothes smelled perpetually of smoke.  But, again, I was so used to living in smoke-filled rooms that I didn’t notice the odor.  After all, smoking was normal.  And not just normal.  Smoking was adult.  Smoking was sexy.  In those pre-internet days, television was king, and smoking was all over television.  Newscasters smoked.  Television personalities smoked.  I can still see Dean Martin with a drink in one hand and a cigarette in the other.  

And, oh, the ads.  The Marlboro Man rode on horseback across our screens, admonishing the viewer to “Come to where the flavor is; come to Marlboro country.”  Marlboro country was a mythical place, where men were rugged cowboys, and smoking was cool.  

These ads, of course, were aimed at men.  Women were meant to be enticed by Virginia Slims ads, which co-opted the nascent women’s movement.  

Despite the Surgeon General’s 1964 report linking cigarette smoking to cancer, bronchitis, and other diseases, it wasn’t until 1970, that cigarette ads were banned from television and radio. By then, I had witnessed countless hours of said ads, not to mention dozens of old movies that made cigarette smoking look sophisticated.  These days, only lowlifes and baddies smoke in movies and on TV, but it wasn’t always so. 

My love of old movies and the best efforts of advertisers notwithstanding, I never did succumb to the siren call of cigarettes. Well, there was that one time. I was maybe 18 when, on a whim, I bought a pack at Walgreens and, standing outside, took a few covert puffs, before choking and throwing the rest of the pack in a nearby garbage can.  That was the alpha and omega of my smoking career. 

I’m glad smoking is no longer acceptable in restaurants and offices, at least in our part of the world.  I’m glad I no longer have to stand in a pall of smoke while waiting to use the loo on an airplane.  I’m glad my experience in the parking lot yesterday was unusual enough to be noteworthy.  And I hope that scenes such as the one I am about to describe will one day be a thing of the past.  

My mother lived in an assisted living facility for 12 years.  Those residents who wished to smoke were shunted outside to a gazebo, where they would huddle with their cigarettes in all kinds of weather.  I was especially saddened by the elderly women, for whom smoking had been so glamorous in their World-War-II youth. Seeing them wizened and furtive always gave me a pang. They had not had the benefit of the Surgeon General’s report.  I doubt they knew they were engaging in an addictive activity. I hope that smoking calmed them and gave them courage during the war, and I am sorry it burdened them in their final years. I hope their children and grandchildren have found other ways to self-soothe.  

And I hope you will breathe free tonight, cozy inside a smoke-free home.   

WHEN DID IT ALL GO WRONG? (and how shall we meet the moment?)

Here I am living my life in a western nation, a supposedly "civilized" nation, a nation of plenty.  So, why did I lie awake last night wondering if I am living in hell?

Well, there was the debate -- a string of lies from the Republican candidate and confusion from our current president.  Although, to be fair, the liar himself frequently spews whole nonsensical paragraphs at his rallies.  Let's face it - they are both too old.  

And yet, this is our choice.

Then there was the attempted assassination of the Republican candidate. Look, if you have been reading my blog for a while or if you know me personally, you know it would be an understatement to say I do not wish to see him in the White House again.  That does not mean, however, that I want someone to shoot him.  I have lived through three assassinations.  These shootings tear at the  fabric of our democracy, along with the bodies at which they are aimed.  

Here's another reason why I couldn't sleep last night.  I made the mistake of looking at the news before going to bed.  I am usually wise enough not to do this.  I guess I had a lapse in judgment.  I watched a video of three different young white men angrily threatening violence in response to the attempted assassination.  

How is anyone sleeping these days?

I haven't even mentioned climate change or the recent Supreme Court decision, granting monarch-like powers to the President or attempts to drag women back to the 1950s, not to mention the wars in Gaza, Ukraine, Sudan, and Somalia.  I just can't go there today.  

When did the pile-up begin? Was it 9/11?  Was it Sandy Hook?  Was it Parkland?  (Too many mass shootings to list here.) Was it January 6?  Was it the pandemic?  

Is it just that I have lived long enough to be feeling the pile-up?  I did, after all, grow up during the Cold War, which brought with it the Cuban Missile Crisis and the threat of nuclear annihilation.  There were also the aforementioned assassinations--two Kennedys and Martin Luther King, Jr, the Vietnam War, and more.  

Of course, things were pretty bad before my time.  My father lived through two world wars, my mother through one.  They endured the bombing of their city during the Second World War.  

Really -- Was there ever a time when things were ok?  I have a friend whose father once asked her when in the past she might like to have lived.   She had to tell him that, as a woman, she could think of no time in the past when she would have wanted to live.   

Sorry to dump all of this on you.  Maybe I'm feeling overwhelmed because of my lack of sleep last night.  Tonight, I will not read the news before bed, and tomorrow I will be able to heed these words from the late historian Howard Zinn, posted by a friend on FB this morning:

To be hopeful in bad times is not just foolishly romantic.  It is based on the fact that human history is a history, not only of cruelty, but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, What we choose to emphasize in this complex history will determine our lives.  If we only see the worst, it destroys our capacity to do something.  If we remember those times and places--and there are many--where people have behaved magnificently, this gives us the energy to act, and at least the possibility of sending this spinning top of a world in a different direction.

And if we do act, in however small a way, we won't have to wait for some grand utopian future. The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory.

So, friends, let us take heart.  Let's live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us.

Let us be radically kind. 

 

In the words of Mr. Rogers, let's look for the helpers.  

 

Let's be the helpers.

                                              Photo by Lina Trochez on Unsplash

 

 

 

 

YES, YOU CAN BE TOO RICH OR TOO THIN

“You can never be too rich or too thin”

-       Attributed to Wallis Simpson, among others.

 

I beg to differ, Wallis.

Some time ago, I found myself alone in an airport with a few hours to kill before my next flight.  Looking for a mindless way to pass the time, I went to a newsstand and bought a couple of magazines.  Upon opening one, I was confronted with a familiar sight -- the first ten or so pages consisted entirely of photos of emaciated young models, wearing frowns (they never smile), and posing their puny bodies in aid of selling one thing or another.  

Without hesitation, I sat down on a bench and proceeded to tear out said pages.  As I was energetically tearing, a woman unknown to me came over to cheer me on.

"Don't those pictures drive you crazy," she asked.

"Yes," said I, ripping with ever greater enthusiasm.

I was on a roll.

Of course, my ripping out the pages was not going to change long-standing advertising strategies.  Still, I refuse to spend time looking at these images.  It infuriates me to have our daughters (and ourselves) presented with images of dangerously underweight women as if this were something to aspire to.  

We don't have to buy into this, do we?

Let me assure you that this is not the sour grapes of a woman with a large body. I have always been naturally thin.  (At least until menopause when, I gained a bit around my middle). My weight, however, is not a sign of virtue or of any particular effort on my part.  And I certainly don't aspire to look like those models.  In fact, at my age, too much weight loss is a sign of either illness or drug addiction.

Indeed, I suspect there are drugs involved in keeping those models so painfully thin.  

But, maybe it isn’t the models I need to concern myself with.  After all, if young people are reading magazines at all, they are probably reading them online, where ads can be skipped over.  Maybe I should be turning my attention to social media “influencers” bent on convincing average-sized young girls that they need to lose weight.  Down that road lie anorexia and self-loathing.  

I sure don’t want that to be the future for my toddler granddaughters.

So, yes, Wallis, it is possible to be too thin, and to create unhappiness by urging people in that direction.

And what of the notion that one can never be too rich?

I know there are plenty of people in this world who would conclude that I--sitting in my comfortable house, with a car in the garage, and a bit of disposable income--am too rich.  But for purposes of this post, I am confining myself to the filthy rich, the one percent.

Elon Musk’s wealth is estimated at $221.4 billion.  Jeff Bezos’ net worth is $210.2 billion, while Bill Gates comes in at $133.3 billion.  These are big numbers, and when we put them in perspective, they look even more alarming. A quick Google search revealed that the top one percent of Americans control more wealth than the entire middle class combined, with the middle class defined as the middle 60 percent of households by income.  

Okay.  That was wealth.  Let’s look at income for a minute. Social security data reveals that the average annual wage of the bottom 90 percent is $40,928; the average wage of those in the 90^th to 99^th percentile is $187,609; and the average wage of the top one percentile is $916,928.  Parsing things even further, the top .1 percentile earns an average of $3.7 million. 

One more figure:  CEOs were paid 399 times as much as a typical worker in 2021.

Enough with the numbers.***  It is clear that a few people control most of the wealth in this country, and that a great swath of our citizenry is scraping by, while their bosses get richer and richer. 

So, yes, I would argue it is possible to be too rich. Embarrassingly rich. And yet I suspect that the mega rich, cocooned in their bubbles of wealth, are not embarrassed.  (Asking for a friend – Do they not realize that if our way of life topples under the weight of their wealth, they will not be spared the fallout?  Do they not see that if their greed overcomes environmental concerns, their children will inherit a dying planet? That income and wealth inequity lead to social unrest?)

It is said that power corrupts.  So, I think, does great wealth. And they usually go together.  On that note, I will leave you with this suggestion. If you want an example of how power and money corrupt, get yourself a copy of Empire of Pain:  The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty by Patrick Radden Keefe. There you will read of the corruption, not only of a family, but of the lawyers and doctors they drew into their web, along with the FDA and the DEA.  As this book demonstrates, very few are immune to the twin siren calls of money and power. 

One last thing.  Perhaps it is time to update the adage with which I began this post.  How about this?  You can’t be too kind or too healthy.  

 

                                                     Photo by Mathieu Stern on Unsplash

*** Different studies turn up different numbers, but all demonstrate great income and wealth inequality.