Informant38

Ω{Because there's no history anymore, not even in families, anybody born after 1980 has no picture of the time when smoking was as normal as breathing. People could smoke anywhere and everywhere. The teachers' lounge at any school was a box of smoke and ashes, people smoked in stores, on buses, virtually anyplace you had to wait in line. It was normal is my point. It was accepted because it was normal, because everybody did it and accepted it. Cars are exactly like that, a damaging absurdity, an aberration people were tricked into adopting, and then once enough were doing it, it became normal.
There's no record of who and how smoking got turned from an attribute of adulthood to a failing of the poor and strange. Because that same energy might be turned against something the controlling interests still have use for. The pretense is 'we' did it. The big amorphic blob that watches itself on TV. 'We' just stopped smoking, just like 'we' just started smoking all those decades back. On a whim. Because we felt like it.
I can remember the shock and defensive antagonism of people whose 'right' to smoke was challenged back in the darkness of the 60's. Then it was like this unexplained awakening, suddenly everybody knew smoking was bad for you, and all those lawsuits made the commissions and agencies afraid, and that was that.
The tobacco industry, as big as it is, wasn't an integral part of the American economy the way oil and automobiles are. So even though the news is real bad vis a vis the lungs of the world and the smoking engines, 'we're' not quitting. 'We'll' be talking through a vocoder with a portable oxygen tank strapped to our back and chain-smoking all day long, just like now.}