What the hell is going ON?

What's driving this new puritanical pyche in our culture? Have we gone stark raving fucking MAD??

I could almost understand the ban on smoking. I'm not a smoker myself but have I been in the past. Still, even as a non-smoker, I was irked by the Puritanical Police dictating to people how to live their lives. There aren't many addictive substances that society allows. Which is a good thing. But let's face it, we're human. We have flaws. We need to make some allowances for this. We need to give people some 'breathing space' when it comes to making their own choices. Granted big tobacco corporations are making a fortune trading in on people's lives, and this is one of the reasons I could come to terms with the puritanical police starting their assault against smoking, but simultaneously, people make choices. And often they make informed choices. No one in this day and age can deny they haven't been given plenty of information about the dangers of smoking. We need to stop sueing the shit out of each other and take some personal responsibility.

Now it's one thing to fight against the big tobacco corporations who hide information from the public about the dangers of their product, or who manipulate people into buying a product that they know is dangerous, and it's another thing when the Puritanical Police start banning of all smoking in public arenas. Yet even this is understandable. It's only a natural progression from understanding how passive smoking affects non-smokers. But it's another thing again when the New Puritans begin to take actions against what people do in their own homes. Things start to take a sinister twist right there.

No one wants to think that some poor unsuspecting children are getting sick from second-hand smoke, but logic would tell you that most responsible smoking parents don't want to hurt their children and will find alternative ways of protecting them from their own habits, once they understand the dangers. So educate them. But don't go into people's homes and start dictating to them how they should live, taking away their rights. What do you want to do next, stick a brain-washing television that can never be turned off in the corner of every lounge room? We might as well all move to North Korea then! I hate to tell you this people, but work in aged-care long enough and you realise that most people die of cancer related illness if they live long enough. .. It's not nice, it hurts but the truth is we're all DIEING.

My understanding is that these New Putirtans want to eventually ban smoking outright, and I can feel some of my civil liberties being eroded again, the right to to make mistakes, the right to human error, the right to regret in the face of my bad choices if I so decide, are drying up in a puddle. They may be well-meaning, on a campaign to save every life from their owir own horrible cancer-ridden fate, but will you stop for god's sake people! Will you stop already! You've fought the good fight, you've kicked corporate murderer arse, not let us all be adults and take responsibility for ourselves and will you accept that some of us are going to make painful and irreversible mistakes at times? It's called humanity. Stop trying to clean us up, clean death up. If you want to continue this fight, kill two birds with one stone and keep aim at the tobacco corporations, bring them down. At least that way death won't be wholesale.

And now it's the grog they want to start fiddling with. Some people are alcoholics, but many many people aren't, and oh man, if you come between me and my bottles of wine of a Friday and Saturday night I won't be a happy girl. I play the game every weekday and on the weekend I want to relax and become a little irresponsible - forget the fact that I am actually dieing slowly day-by-day just through the very process of living. Just have some fun. Just enjoy being alive in the moment and stop worrying about money and work and the strain of having to support my life in this god forsaken capitalist rat race. All the little industrial ants out there, who don't have access to the same health care system as the elite classes, who won't live as long anyway because their work is harder and the time in their day for themselves and their families is shorter, who are aware of their own mortality anyhow because of it all - just want a drink sometimes to forget. Some of my best childhood memories were sitting around the floor in my parent's kitchen on the weekends looking at Seventies album covers while the adults got 'happy' and communal. Not all drinkers are alcoholics, that's a personal problem. And many things contain poisons. You cannot eradicate all the poisions from our environment. You can only learn to live with them relatively safely.

Oh and this morning on TV it was JUMPING CASTLES. Because now jumping castles are dangerous. Jumping Castles - are you people serious? Sure, someone could actually DIE falling off the side of a jumping castle, but most people don't! Our kids have already lost the water slide and the slip-and-slide and the garden sprinkler through water shortages, and you're going to take another slightly dangerous and exhilarating opportunity for fun away from them. Risk taking rides can teach children the art of self-control in the face of an out-of-control situation.

Oh for fuck's sake. Yes we can die smoking. We can become alcoholics. We can die in a car accident, a plan accident, we can choke on a chicken bone, we can fall off trampolines and jumping castles and break our necks, we can get bitten by sting-rays, have allergic reactions to bees, get bitten by a spider, we can take a wrong step on a stair and trip to our deaths, we can wake up one day and have a deadly disease. We can give up smoking and go to the doctor only to be told we've contracted a deadly STD, passed on to us unsuspectingly by our cheating spouse. True, most sane people will want to minimize the odds of dying by stopping behaviour they know will contribute to the chances of an early death. But some won't.

New Puritans, you cannot control humanity, you cannot control some people's violent disregard for their own safety. The best thing you can do to protect the general public against themselves, is educate them. There are some substances, activities and behaviours that do need state interference because the dangers are so high. And it's possible that smoking may be one of those and I'm just not ready to receive this because I so much hate the notion that I could smoke or not smoke at my own discretion, but by-and-large, I suspect it's not because of the interest of the state for the individual, as much as it is in the interest of the the state for a robust, healthy and majorly efficient and productive work force work force. And of course whose crazy enough to argue when the benefits are personal. But are they really?

We're really beginning to police ourselves like a fundamental religious organisation aimed at eradicating anything we consider 'evil.' And evil seems to be in everything and everywhere we look, as it is also for a fanatic.

People, ugly and as scary as it is, even for me, life is about RISK, and inevitably DEATH. And if we just accepted that we'd have less people running around sueing each other for breathing on us when they smoked, for making wrong decisions in the operating room, for letting our children go on their jumping castles. We'd be more forgiving of human error and inevitably more compassionate to our brothers and sisters. We'd be more human.

Understand this and come to peace with it: EVERYTHING IS POTENTIALLY DANGEROUS!!