So some guy in an enormous, shiny SUV pulls up alongside a friend of mine, lowers his window and says snottily, “I hope you’re going to clean that up.” My poor friend was on the sidewalk with a baby in his backpack, a three-year-old in one hand, and a pooping dachsund at the end of a leash. At the moment Mr. SUV offered this neighborly suggestion, my friend was struggling to get the plastic bag out of his jeans pocket.
At some point in recent years, people (at least in southern California) started thinking it was OK to tell total strangers how to live.
How did we get from the live-and-let-live I grew up with to this? I’ve concluded that anti-smoking social marketing campaigns are, at least partly, to blame. Criticizing and marginalizing smokers became an acceptable behavior because it was encouraged by social marketing campaigns and supported by institutions. With time, more and more people jumped on the bandwagon. I think smokers ended up being the object of a lot of repressed rage, frankly. But these days, they’re spreading the rage around. People will give you dirty looks, or even say something snide if you’re fat, if you drop a piece of trash accidentally, if you park in a loading zone… What we have here is a severe case of viral social marketing. It’s ballooned into a holier-than-thou free for all. Unfortunately, when people are sanctioned to scorn other members of society if they perceive them or their behaviors to be unacceptable, the result is endemic disrespect and even enmity.
I can’t recall any specific anti-smoking campaigns before my son was in elementary school in the 90s, at which point he started coming home from school with red D.A.R.E. ribbons and telling me I shouldn’t smoke. A couple of years later, other people’s kids started telling me that. I’d usually respond with “When I was a kid, kids didn’t tell adults what to do.” But instead of backing me up, my friends just tended to keep their kids away from me when I was smoking (which was usually fine with me). About 10 years ago, some lady walked up to me where I was standing on a street corner and said “Thanks for killing me.” I told her she could move, that I was there first.
I’ve heard people say Nancy Reagan’s “Just Say No” program didn’t work, but now I’m not so sure. This article describes a recent poll of registered voters in which they were asked if they would vote to make cigarettes illegal. Forty-five percent of Americans said they would. Among 18-29 year olds, the number was 57%. My son, at 21, falls right into that age group. This demographic is Nancy Reagan’s target market. Evidently “Just Say No” didn’t make a dent in drug use, but that’s probably because people weren’t standing around shooting up at little league practice or snorting coke at the table next to you in a restaurant. Smokers fed their habits in plain sight. They were fair game.
I got into the San Diego airport not long ago and saw a sign that said “Welcome to California: America’s non-smoking section.” I loved it. I should probably point out here, for the sake of my own credibility, that I’m not an embittered smoker. I strongly believe that non-smokers shouldn’t have to breathe cigarette smoke.
Thanks to anti-smoking social marketing campaigns, the dam has broken. Overt contempt for everybody else is now flowing freely. We need to harness that contempt and all that repressed rage and use it for the greater good. I suggested not long ago that people start treating their Hummer-driving peers to some of their disdain for the damage they’re doing to the environment. It really seems to work, after all. But will they do it? Could this approach shake Americans out of their new-car-smell stupor? (Talk about habits…)
I moved to France recently. My American friends’ number one complaint about France was always the smoke. But the French are finally outlawing smoking in public places. There were endless public debates about the proposed new laws here. The French don’t like feeling that they’re being infantilized by their government. They value their personal freedoms highly and don’t want to live in a nanny state like Americans do. I think it’s interesting that they managed to change such a deep-rooted cultural habit without treating large numbers of fellow citizens like crap. Imagine that.
The other day, walking along a street in the Latin Quarter, I saw a grungy, gothish Euro-youth wearing a D.A.R.E. t-shirt. Wild.