When someone says “for the children” ……
…..What does it really mean?
Tobacco Control personnel and organizations, including loud sub-arms of the American Lung Association and the American Cancer Society, routinely testify that vaping threatens to undo all their years of work “for the children.”
Yet the science and numbers show that vaping itself is leading adults and youth away from smoking if anything.
The clue to this is in these oft-repeated TC phrases: “A Tobacco-Free World,” “Tobacco End-Game,” and “the risk of another generation addicted to nicotine.”
Notice they are not saying a smoke-free world, or a smoke-caused-disease-free world. In fact, an American Cancer Society spokeswoman stated:
“This tax at 92 percent of wholesale would create parity with cigarettes and other tobacco products, which will help eliminate the switching to e-cigarettes.”
The only possible explanation for wanting to stop the switch to something 99%-95% safer is that they want to save souls — not bodies, health, lives, or families.
They have a dream, which they have worked heartbreakingly hard to achieve, of a world without nicotine users. This is why ventilation or smoke-free tobacco or tobacco-free vapes are NEVER the answer to their dream – only nicotine prohibition, backed up by a demand for DEA-style enforcement in countries where high taxes have created a black market.
They are not really asking for these anti-smokefree-nicotine legal actions for the children, they are asking for them for their dream for the children.
Not the same thing.
A statement by the CDC’s Tim McAfee to the Senate health committee made it clear that Tobacco Controllers and the CDC are perfectly willing to sacrifice grandparents “for the children.”
“This is a huge experiment, and it is not fair to ask our children to pay the price(1) for that, for the hypothetical(2) benefit of adult smokers.”
So, here we have a fairly-bald statement from the CDC that the loss of family elders is not a concern “for the children.” This contradicts numerous studies(3) as well as common-sense observation of poor and/or minority families. It also contradicts a logical conclusion we can draw from studies showing the children of smokers are more likely to smoke: help the elders quit, and the kids will be safer.
So what does it mean when a person or group has a “dream for the children?” Anything from the great and magnanimous to the average and admirable to the short-sighted, selfish, or venal. There are groups that want a Christian world for the children. Or a Moslem world. Or a gay-free world, or a white one. or a chaste world. Each of these dreams is completely genuine, and some are even understandable to some (others not so much.)
Having dreams of a world “your way,” and even expressing them, is constitutionally allowed in the U.S. of A.
What is not morally or constitutionally defensible is putting the state’s power behind those moral, religious, or personal-taste dreams.
We have traditionally remembered the obligation to resist codifying one group’s dreams “for the children” but wrt tobacco harm reduction, many have suddenly developed amnesia concerning the rights of average families generate their own dreams for their children, rather than having others’ dreams imposed on them.
Time to wake up to the curses and the gifts of reality.
- The price is imaginary, per gov’t statistics that the CDC had in hand at the time: http://www.samhsa.gov/data/NSDUH/2012SummNatFindDetTables/NationalFindings/gifs/nfr-Fig4-2-2k12.gif
- The benefits are not hypothetical: http://www.mdpi.com/1660-4601/11/5/4965
- The Role of Grandparents in the Lives of Youth http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3462462/
Gratitude. Grr! Attitude! 
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If you destroy someone’s confidence they immediately replace it with fear.
Protecting other people’s children, as a class requiring “protections”, implies only one thing. That their own parents can not be trusted and exist as the primary risk to those children. So why are these humanitarians so shy about expressing their beliefs in a more straight forward fashion? That people have lost not only their basic instincts of survival, along with any control by coherent thought, necessary to make autonomous choices and decisions, but now all forms of empathy toward their own offspring? Protecting the children is an ideological cult “movement” [their own word] with roots in 1930s Germany expressed as a vital component of constructing the master race and all that jazz. Promotions are pretty simplistic almost too easy in the current culture. Through the now popular early childhood development programs, children can be taught at the earliest possible age, and thus constructing a lifetime belief, that their parents can not be trusted. That their very survival is consistent with organizing those smart enough, to see through their parent’s ignorance, and to rise victorious above them.
In a world where it is now largely believed that every discomfort or fear, can only be resolved through the powers of more aggressive lawmaking, people have been led to a place that they actually believe they are as the government consistently describes them. Incoherent untrustworthy and in need of protections against themselves and each other. Logically elections are no longer necessary if those decisions [voting] can also lead to great harms.
As an alternative in view of those sworn to serve those who elected them, if there is no trust admitted or respected, isn’t that also indicative that the powers that be, also question the outcome of the elections that gave them those paternalist powers?
BTW paternalist is the kinder and gentler word we are forced to use, when respect for social etiquette [avoiding unnecessary fear mongering or insult] and debating rules, precludes the word fascist. It’s a case of understanding what we see, while prolonging the hesitation in sounding an alarm, while fearful of disturbing the children.
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