Tuesday, December 08, 2009
Metro columnist Dan Casey: Smoking column fires up readers
Dan Casey is The Roanoke Times' metro columnist.
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@roanoke.com
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Dan Casey
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Kim Bradshaw of Troutville is a hardworking mom and a smoker who doesn't take kindly to being called "an inconsiderate oaf."
My Dec. 1 column about the launch of Virginia's restaurant smoking ban called restaurant smokers just that.
It prompted Bradshaw, a Roanoke restaurant employee, to jump on the phone and let me have it.
"I'd rather be an 'oaf' any day than a self-important pompous ass," Bradshaw told me. "Just because I'm a smoker does not mean I'm an oaf. I'm a hardworking mother and you're an idiot."
She was one of scores of readers who loved or hated that pointed column, which a wise, nonsmoking editor actually toned down after advising me "you come across like a jerk."
There was no shortage of readers who agreed with Bradshaw.
"While I agree nonsmokers have the right to not breathe second hand smoke, why all the nastiness?" Lauren Brown, a smoker who lives in Roanoke, asked in an e-mail.
"You can get your point across without the attitude you have. All you did was make me wish I could blow some smoke in your face."
The Rev. Morris Fleischer of Christiansburg is a nonsmoker who's happy about the law, which requires restaurants that permit indoor smoking to have a closed-off and separately ventilated room for it. But he thought Brown had a point.
"We don't have to get nasty about this issue," he wrote on my blog. "There is never any valid or moral ground upon which we can dehumanize others."
As for the law itself, "smoking is a luxury, not a right," Fleischer wrote. "The constitutional concept of 'the pursuit of happiness' is not followed by the words 'at someone else's expense.' The physiological need for human beings to breathe, will always trump/supersede anyone's desire to smoke."
But there were also many readers who thought the column was right on target.
"I agree with your smoking ban article 1,000% and love your hard tone," Tom Lacey of Montvale wrote in an e-mail. "I come from upstate New York and was there when the smoking ban was put into place, and most of the bars and restaurants survived."
Another was Joe Black of Hardy, who, shortly after the ban took effect, enjoyed a hamburger at the bar in the Valley View Applebee's without the irritation of cigarette smoke.
"I loved your column on Dec. 1 about the foul tebaccies no longer polluting the air and sickening us law-abiding, non-addicted citizens," he wrote in an e-mail. "Thanks for printing it -- that took some guts."
Bobby Shelton of Radford called in and said he wishes the column had run on the front page, instead of the photo and article that ran there. That was about defiant smokers who staged last-ditch smoke-ins at a couple of Roanoke restaurants the night before the ban took effect.
He called those smokers "crybabies who can't smoke and blow smoke in people's faces and get it on our clothes."
Shelton continued: "You don't know how bad, over the years, I've wanted to take deer lure and spray it in smokers' faces that blow it [smoke] in my face."
As for the ban, he said, "thank goodness for it, we're as happy as can be."
Thanks for all the phone calls, e-mails and blog posts, folks.
Please keep them coming.
