WHO is it exactly who wants to ban smoking cigarettes in bars? Let's see. It's not the smokers, because, well, they smoke. It's not most of the non-smoking patrons of bars because they patronize bars where smoking takes place. It's not most of the employees, because many of them smoke themselves and the others would rather work in bars where people smoke then find jobs somewhere else. Where there’s
smoke, there’s ireIt's not the people who don't go to bars because they don't give a rip about it. It's certainly not bar owners because they know that their economic likelihood depends on tourists and many tourists, especially from Asia, smoke like smoke stacks.
So, let's see. I guess that leaves several city council members and some politically correct supporters who actually want to abolish smoking altogether.
Now, why do council members Henry Felix, Steve Holmes and a few others, want to ban smoking in bars. Well, we know that for Holmes, making smoking illegal is a personal crusade. He is the only person we know of who actually snatched a cigarette from a person's mouth in public.
Felix says his desire to ban smoking in bars is to protect the health of the workers involved. But wait, can this be true? Just how much of Honolulu's total work force do bar employees constitute? It's got to be a minority. And, like I said, has anyone ever surveyed bar employees to see how many of them smoke themselves? And even if we turn bars into little oases of health, how do we know that these employees are not endangering their lives in other ways, like wolfing down cheeseburgers and fries or main-lining lard? Maybe they engage in unsafe sex. Maybe they play with guns. Maybe the council shouldn't be concentrating so much on protecting their health when we don't know whether they even want their health protected in the first place.
I'VE generally found that people who work in bars are fairly liberal about indulging in legal vices, whereas, people who work in libraries are generally against gulping down other people's smoke. It's foggy in my mind, but I think they call that ... personal choice.
But let's say that people are too stupid to take care of themselves and they need a handful of City Council men and women to help them through life. Why is Felix focusing on cocktail lounge employees and not, say, the guys who work down at the refuse transfer station? I mean, I can hardly breathe when I go there to dump my junk. The air is toxic. And yet, there seems to be no effort by Holmes et al to get respirators or SCUBA tanks for those poor stiffs who have to breathe that stink all day long.
Or how about all the thousands and thousands of government employees who are forced to breathe contaminated office air all day? Legislators were pretty quick to rip the asbestos out of their own little Capitol hidey hole but what about all the other state and city buildings that suffer from "old building syndrome." That's what I call it. It's not scientific. But it refers to old buildings that have old air conditioning systems in them that circulate spores and mold and cold germs all day long. Why do one out of three government employees suffer from perennial sniffles?
So, I still don't get this no-smoking-in-bars effort by Felix and his buddies. If you want to encourage non-smoking bars, give business people who open them a break on taxes, fees and stuff like that. Mr. Felix, Hawaii is not California. California's economy is diverse and booming. And they don't enforce the smoking ban there anyway. Hawaii depends on tourists and tourists smoke. And our businesses are not booming. They are dying.
So why don't you guys learn the message voters tried to send a few days ago which is: fix the economy and otherwise leave us alone. For one thing, it might make your re-election a little easier.
Charles Memminger, winner of
National Society of Newspaper Columnists
awards in 1994 and 1992, writes "Honolulu Lite"
Monday, Wednesday and Friday.
Write to him at the Honolulu Star-Bulletin,
P.O. Box 3080, Honolulu, 96802
or send E-mail to charley@nomayo.com or
71224.113@compuserve.com.
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