Victory Soap v. 2.0

I have news for the people at CRACKED -- who seem genuinely shocked underneath the sarcastic humor -- but people did indeed know about the "Holy shit, this stuff fucking kills you" aspect of tobacco back in the Seventies, and even before then. The famous Surgeon General's warning has been on cigarettes in this country since the mid-Sixties, but even before then people were under no illusion that smoking caused health problems. My parents, for instance, knew that it wasn't fresh air and sunshine that made them hack up their lungs every morning (the sound was my alarm clock in my early childhood years). The difference was people didn't care. No, change that -- people had weighed the difference between the pleasures of smoking, and the pleasures of a life free of gobs of brown mucus in the sink, yellow fingers, and premature wrinkles, and made choices accordingly in the manner of a free people. I, for instance, chose all by myself to breathe in air rather than smoke, and I did it all despite being surrounded by the dreaded "peer pressure" (and the contradictory need to appear adult and cool) that was supposed to program us all like so many robots. Lord knows I hate to say one word of praise for the Seventies, but I must admit that back then we weren't quite so terrified of dying as we are now. The fact that we survived the Seventies should actually be evidence that we are made of sterner stuff than HillaryCare & Co. want us to realize...

(Via Kathy Shaidle.)