People have begun to look at me like I’m crazy when I describe how things used to be when I was younger. I don’t really blame them because some of the things seem just so far-fetched. Take cigarette smoking for example. One of my earliest childhood memories is being in a doctor’s office with my mother and both of my older brothers. When the doctor finished his examination, he sat down and lit up a cigarette in his exam room, with three little kids sitting there. No one thought there was anything wrong with it.
My dad used to smoke in the car with my brothers and I all sitting in the backseat. Years later, I was discussing it with my brother, Gary, and we both recalled the nicotine rush we would get from the second hand smoke when he would first light up. We all worked at dad’s grocery store when we were just kids. The cigarette salesmen used to come in with pockets full of cash. They would buy all of the smokers working there a pack of cigarettes, even us kids (we started smoking young, since we already had a head start). I think I was about twelve years old when I received a pack from one of the salesmen. Talk about your merchants of death.
Smoking was ubiquitous; no one gave it a second thought. You could smoke walking down the aisle of the supermarket and no one mentioned it if you flicked ashes on the floor or ground out the butt when you finished. I remember going to lunch with four other guys from work one Saturday afternoon, and all of us lit a cigarette when we sat down. There wasn’t a no-smoking section either, it was acceptable to smoke anywhere in the restaurant, and no one made a peep. I can also remember visiting a friend in the hospital, I don’t think we were even old enough to drive at the time, or only one of us could. Three or four of us would crowd on his side of a double room, and we would all light up, including the patient. The poor guy on the other side of the room wouldn’t say a thing.
Recently, there was a TV show about air travel in the early 1960’s, Pan Am, which portrayed the time when the first commercial jets (Boeing 707s) went into service. It showed some people smoking in the airplanes, but I remarked to my mother that it didn’t seem realistic, since not enough people were smoking. She agreed, telling me that she thought she would pass-out from all the smoke (she’s never smoked) on a flight to Hawaii once. The series Mad Men comes closer to the reality of the situation, where everyone in the office is puffing away. I can recall being on a flight from Dallas to Chicago in the early ‘70’s. I was fifteen or sixteen, maybe even younger, but for some reason, I was flying alone. After the “No Smoking” light went off, just about everyone in the back sections of First Class and Coach (they had segregated smoking sections by then) lit up a smoke. There was an older gentleman seated next to me, probably in his 60’s, who asked me if he could bum a smoke from me. He explained that he normally smoked a pipe, but the airlines didn’t let you smoke pipes or cigars on planes, only cigarettes.
What really blows the minds of younger people is when I tell them that the first year I was in college (1974-75), we were allowed to smoke in the classroom, during instruction. I remember more than one teacher bumming cigarettes from the students. After the first year, they made us smoke in the halls, before class. I can’t remember if it was during graduate school, or later, that they finally made everyone smoke outside.
So where is all this going, you may ask? Am I recommending a return to the wide-open days of yore? Of course not, given what we now know about smoking, it would be inconceivable to want to return to past ways. Yet as we make progress in other areas, there are those among us who would have us return to the “Good Old Days” for the sake of saving money, under that all-powerful guise of “creating jobs”. If we relax air and water quality standards, we’ll be able to create more jobs. Never mind that China is currently poisoning its entire domestic water supply in the name of manufacturing efficiency. If we lower the minimum wage (or eliminate it entirely---let the market decide) it will create more jobs. Should we do away with child labor laws as well? It’s been suggested, and it would create more jobs. Or are we content to buy our clothing from overseas, where some one else’s child made it?
The loudest current scream comes from those who would have us do away with the new Affordable Care Act, a mild attempt to create universal health care in the one remaining industrialized nation without it. “It is a job killer,” they argue. “We can’t afford it,” they warn. The weird thing is, they said the same thing when smoking bans started. They cried and fretted when President Nixon signed into law the bill that created the Environmental Protection Agency, leading to cleaner air and safer water. Historically, they also had bad things to say about child labor laws and minimum wage laws. Oh yeah, Social Security and Medicare gave them major hissy fits as well. I believe at the time they were labeled “Communism” and “the beginning of socialized medicine in the United States”, respectively.
I’m not a Communist, or even a Socialist, not even close. When I left business school with my MBA, I was a follower of the Chicago school of economics, where it was thought that free, unregulated markets worked best. Experience has taught me that we do need some regulation to hold back the negative aspects of unfettered greed. Refer to the economic meltdown of 2008 if you don’t agree. We could discuss it, but if you don’t believe it by now, I doubt if you’re susceptible to reason.
So, should we turn back the clock? Should we return to the glories of the good old days? Let me light up a smoke and…hack, hack…think about it.
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