Smokers Break Personal Space

To the Editors:

The fart stench enters your nasal passages right as you’re stepping onto the elevator. Too late to escape, you are now committed to sharing the guilty person’s post-lunchtime digestive experience in all its nauseating glory. You have no alternative except to take tiny breaths through your mouth and wait until you can burst through the doors at the earliest possible opportunity. You vow that next time, you’ll take the stairs. Let us now address the predicament of a non-smoker entering or exiting the Con, the library, the mailroom, King, Dascomb, and Stevenson (these are limited to what I have personally experienced, although I’m certain the trend continues elsewhere). It is perfectly fair to say that the majority of the time, excluding uncommon hours of the day, it is virtually impossible for said non-smoker to avoid walking through a cloud of that which May be Hazardous to one’s Health. Like a fart in an elevator, second-hand smoke is offensive AND unavoidable.
Now before you write a rebuttal that thoroughly refutes the assertion that cigarette smoke is like flatulence, let it be clear that I am well aware that I am comparing apples to oranges. In fact, very little research shows farting (or second-hand farts) to be significantly harmful to one’s health. Additionally, being that breaking wind is arguably uncontrollable, or at least a natural bodily function, there is much more justification for engaging in this potentially annoying activity in public. So I apologize for the exaggeration hope that clears the air. At any rate, having to walk through a hazy blue fog just to get to the fresh air (or to a class) is not only ironic, but highly obnoxious, especially if one is dealing with asthma, or a bronchial infection (or, simply doesn’t LIKE inhaling other people’s smoky CO2). The assumption that one can avoid second-hand smoke if he or she puts his or her respective mind to it just isn’t true. Believe me, I would if I could. But I simply can’t in every circumstance, particularly when the areas surrounding popular entrances and exits are as frequented as they often are by members of the smoking population of Oberlin.
I don’t want to come off like I have a problem with smokers as people. I know that I am addressing many good, moral, and decent people personally with these remarks simply because they choose to smoke. However, under the circumstances, I feel it is necessary to reinstate this very important truism: smoking is NOT strictly a personal activity. It affects everybody in the vicinity, and is often offensive to non-smokers (not to mention harmful to everybody involved over a long period of time). And quite frankly, I really don’t care what people do to their own bodies, provided it doesn’t infringe on anybody else’s rights. Yet, in the same way that it is wrong to dump toxic waste on your neighbor’s lawn, and undesirable, at the very least, to break wind in a crowded elevator, smoking in unavoidable places is an inconsiderate imposition on people who would rather not relinquish their right to breathe freely. Which is why I’m asking for a little consideration on behalf of the non-smokers: please don’t create a chemically unsafe environment right outside the doors of everyone’s public facilities and residence halls. Give us a little breathing room, and we promise to be on our best behavior next time we meet you in the elevator.

–Tom Hoberg
Conservatory first-year