Seatbelts, Smoking, and Our Dignity

I hope you can forgive this post; it's late, I'm tired, but these thoughts are troubling me as of late. So there may be a little rambling. I'm hoping that as I try to sort the thoughts out you'll find some form of coherent thought threading through the words that follow. Please feel free to leave your thoughts on the matter...

Our society is very troubling in that we tell each other that we live in the land of the free (in the United States) and yet there's a bit of cognitive dissonance where we ignore the fact that we're obviously not free. It's much like our students in school are told we live in a democracy (well...to be honest...most adults seem to think we live in a democracy as well). It's not true. We're a representative republic.

We can get ticketed for not wearing our seatbelts if we're pulled over on our nation's roads. I didn't understand this idea. If you're in a car accident and end up maimed or killed because you didn't wear a seatbelt, who else did you really hurt? Without counting the argument that you harm your family by dying, the fact is you didn't infringe on anyone else's freedom or rights by not wearing your seatbelt. You put yourself at risk by not wearing it. You don't put your passenger at risk of anything more, really, than extreme mental or emotional trauma if they see how the accident affects your body.

It's a simple idea...why don't you have a right to act as you wish if you're not harming or infringing on someone else's rights, within reason?

This same country allows you to purchase sticks of nicotine laced with all sorts of additional poisons like arsenic, tar, and...well,...nicotine. Among lots of other trace chemicals. These things are known to cause cancers as well as aging your skin and increasing your risk for strokes, clots, heart attack, etc. etc...our government even imposes a so-called sin tax on such items to "discourage" customers from using them. There are laws imposing limitations on where and when you can smoke as well as what age you must be before purchasing them. Worse, these do infringe on my lungspace...if you're smoking near me, I inhale your fumes. Yet they're still legal and are a billion-dollar industry.

Hmm...what could be in common with these two things, aside from hypocrisy? Possibly it's the fact that these are both industries with powerful lobbies behind them pushing their interests above those of your rights. We are told that seatbelt laws are imposed to protect you, for your own good. No. Seatbelts protecting you are a positive side effect of the insurance industry lobbying for laws to keep their costs down. On the flip side cigarettes are sold because taking them away would be infringing on your right to make decisions for yourself of what risks are or aren't acceptable, and you should be allowed to purchase these things if you're of age and are willing to take the risk. No. If that was really what the government was trying to do then you wouldn't have seatbelt laws. The truth is that cigarettes are socially acceptable and bring in a metric crapload of cash.

Am I the only one that sees such double-dealing going on? I often stop and wonder about people in our society, wondering if anyone else stops to think about the lies we're told and often seem to accept without question, like the idea that we're a democracy or that the founding fathers of the United States founded this country to be a Christian nation. We're not, they didn't. No matter how many times you find the evidence refuting such ideas you soon find someone else repeating the same lies.

I got to thinking about our rights and people's blind acceptance of contrary ideas because my wife's grandmother is in a precarious position right now, healthwise. She was found laying on the floor of her family's bathroom one morning, unconcious, blood sugar off the charts. She's survived several days so far but isn't out of the woods, and last I knew doctors were saying that it appears she has had several small strokes over time and suffered a heart attack the first night she was in the hospital. She is in her mid eighties and has had deteriorating health.

From my understanding some family members were throwing a fit when they found out Grandma had a Do Not Resuscitate order on file.

This poor woman has been through a lot in life. Her children have been fortunate enough to have a chance to say goodbye in case the eventuality of passing on occurs in the near future; those that wished to take advantage of the opportunity appear to have been able to do so. She has come to terms with the possibility of death.

But there are people who persist in the idea that life, no matter what, must be saved. How can we live in a land of the free when we can't choose our own destiny? It's our own life. If it is a divine gift then it is still nonetheless a gift for us to do with as we please; to not have respect for this idea is to undermine our right to basic human dignity.

The lies we are fed, that seatbelts are there to protect us (says the insurance lobbyists) and cigarettes purchases are exercising our capitalist freedoms (say the tobacco lobbyists) and even the idea of America as a democracy (representative republic! Stay awake in your social studies classes!) are an insult to our human dignity; worse we allow others to keep us ignorant to awareness of these issues, so we're insulting our own dignity. Educate yourselves. Become aware of what is going on around you, and become aware of when others are trying to pursuade you for their own benefit.

Retake your dignity. Because if you're willing to be taken advantage of, there's no shortage of people willing to profit from your ignorance and push their own agendas.