|
|||||||
|
|
|
|||||
|
|
|||||||
A Letter to John McCain
Dear Senator McCain,
Until the past couple of years, I held you in remarkably high esteem. The courage and character you showed in the face of remarkable adversity coupled with your apparently sound conservative ideals would have put me at the front of the "McCain for President" bandwagon up until 1996. And then you began to unravel. Although I agree with your positions on many things, your "born again" position on tobacco policy is so completely at odds with the very basic principles of conservative and libertarian philosophy that I must assume you have either "grown" a la Pat Buchanan or completely abandoned whatever ideological principles you possessed. But I get ahead of myself. This weekend I really began to understand what the impact of this policy is on real, flesh and blood people. I wonder if you have any clue.
Like most Minnesotans, I find myself doing little "getaways" in mid-winter to break up the monotony of a northern winter. For the upper-middle class Twin Cities suburban crowd this means a week in Cancun or Disney World. For the rest of us it means a quick weekend getaway to an out of town hotel. This weekend I took the kids and schlepped a couple of hours to New Ulm, a lovely town tucked into the banks of the Minnesota River. Go to any family-oriented hotel in Minnesota on a cold winter weekend and you will find it a seething mass of families. The pool will be filled with screaming, jumping, splashing happy children. Fathers and mothers and uncles and aunts and grandpas and grandmas mill about poolside, laughing and shouting and talking and playing cards. Coolers stocked with Miller and Miller Lite and other fancy beers contend for table space with bags of chips and salsa and peanuts and stale Cheetos and half congealed cans of Cheeze Whiz. These are good, decent hardworking small town folks: farmers, insurance salesmen, housewives, secretaries, factory workers and retirees.
And they all smoke. Every last one them: 21 year old moms, plump Norwegian matrons, dignified old men. It was almost European. Ashtrays overflowed, "No Smoking" signs were not to be seen, parents smoked while their children frolicked on their laps. There was nary a single sterile suburban soccer mom to frown at the smokers or fake a disapproving cough.
These are the people who pay the price for your "compassion". Your motivation in attacking smokers doesn’t mean beans to me. But the results are crystal clear. Whether it be lawsuits against the tobacco companies or higher taxes to dissuade teen smoking, the cost is extracted from the thin wallets of these hard working folks, people whose idea of a good time is to scrape together enough cash to spend a Saturday night at a Holiday Inn. The actual, real-life effect of ‘90s tobacco policy has been the largest transfer of wealth in American History, transferred out of the pockets of these people and into the pockets of trial lawyers and the public health establishment.
This stinks of crass corruption and arrogant elitism, and causes me to wonder how you can still consider yourself an honorable man.
I was fortunate enough to meet another war hero this weekend. I was sitting poolside, having a smoke, watching my daughter frolic in the water, when an elderly gentleman walked toward me, in his gnarled hands he gently cradled his six month old grandson. The child seemed simply delighted by everything he saw, his face continually lighting up with the raw fascination of a world in which every experience was a new experience. This contrasted in a sad but very human kind of way with the world-weary demeanor and painful steps of the old man. I fell into conversation with the grandfather, and found out that he was 81 years of age, and a veteran of the 82nd Airborne who had fought in Europe in WWII. We sat and smoked and talked about the war for a few minutes. With the typical quiet dignity of so many of his generation, he downplayed his role in the war, preferring to talk about the Pacific campaign and the tough time those grunts had.
As he slowly walked away, I found myself thinking about what he and so many of his generation had fought for, and it sure as hell wasn’t tobacco policy. He had risked it all, come home, raised a family and lived a good, decent life (no, his name wasn’t Ryan). He had played by the rules and was preparing to turn the keys over to a new generation.
I think the missing link is faith. This man had faith: faith in his country, in his fellow man, in God. It poured from him as he spoke. For too many today that faith is gone, leaving a vacuum of the soul into which has been poured a cold materialistic puritanism. Health for health’s sake, longevity for longevity’s sake. The Church of High Wellness in which people engaged in minor vices of the wrong sort are not to be viewed as good people with bad habits, but as sinners and apostates, to be punished and shunned by the elect.
You purport to stand for honor, patriotism and concern for veterans. The next time you feel tempted to raise the tobacco tax or stick it to evil "Big Tobacco", take just a minute to think about this elderly veteran, and whether your conscience lets you take more money out of his paltry pension to finance your political voodoo.