I admit, this post is out of the ordinary, but if you’re a tobacco user, please hear me out:
Sometimes, I have dark fantasy-like visions, dreamy-like, but dark, that because of my previous chewing habit that I picked-up in the Middle-East, that a cancer would bloom and come to suddenly eat my face away in the future. If you can recall the doberman pinchers in one of the Resident Evil films, where the dog’s bones are shown, and the skin has thinned and receded so much that there’s no skin at all in certain spots... well, this vision has been haunting me lately. Especially, since I have seen some guys who do go about their lives without a full jaw bone.
I’m still quite young, and I am healthy, but the toll that these haunted visions are having on me, in that they ARE putting fear in me are not without consequence. Not fear for my own benefit, per se, but because of the conclusion of these visions being that I could die, leaving my wife a lonely widow and my children fatherless is what I consider “hell-like.”
I am compelled to write and share this piece, because in the political sense, as a right-winger, I am concerned with influential people pitching the benefits of tobacco as a means to prevent obesity. Here, I am alluding to a tweet that I saw a few months ago (I even “liked” it, which was a photo juxtaposition of a popular beach. The two photos were of the same beach 40 years apart. The older photo was from a time when most were regular smokers/ tobacco users and were skinnier, and the other, a more recent photo where the people are obese and of a current time where smoking is less common.
What I want to say about this is that it’s pathetic to approve of something that’s going to reduce your life span - period. One shouldn’t pick-up tobacco to limit eating shit. Both, being obese and being a regular tobacco user are not good.
And so, I say with great sincerity, please remember (it’s kindergarten level) that old phrase “two wrongs don’t make a right.” There is much “signal jamming” going on in the culture wars, and only those, I believe, who're sincere to what’s wise will go-on least scathed. And so, I think it’s extremely critical for you and your’s benefit that you keep grounded to what you know is wise, good, beautiful and true. You’ll be far better-off ignoring even your closest allies when you know they’re wrong. You can do this without jeopardizing relationships. I think the key, in this regard, and it is unfortunate, but perhaps necessary to know, that it’s an era of “every man for himself,” until whatever changes that are going to be made, begin to settle.
Be careful, and be as wise as you can out there amidst the confusion! ~ Echo
