June 10, 1998
Ain't it amazing how quickly you can change your tune when something
starts affecting you?
I've come to a change of heart lately concerning a couple of
my favorite targets for fun-poking: second-hand smoke and worshipping —
er, saving — the rain forest. After a month and a half of whiffing the
second-hand smoke drifting hundreds of miles northward from the burning
rain forests in Mexico and Central America, I've done a 180-degree turnabout.
I've always been a fairly tolerant tobacco user. I'm not completely
insensitive. I didn't think it too unfair when they started partitioning
restaurants and moving smoking lounges outdoors.
Some people just can't stand the smell of smoke. No problem there.
But when people started raising Cain about being actually physically harmed
by second-hand smoke, well, I'll admit to insensitivity.
I mean, I grew up across the street from Shell's big refinery
in Deer Park. What harm could there possibly be in extremely-dispersed
smoke from a few cigarettes drifting across a crowded room?
I guess it was when I was coughing the brown stuff from the rain-forest
fires out of my lungs that their arguments came back to me. Granted, there's
a size difference between trees and cancer sticks, but the end effect isn't
that hard to extrapolate.
Which brings us to the second stanza.
I've also been a big lampooner of eco-freaks and their "save
the rain forest" spiel. Not that I think having nice green trees and weeds
is a bad thing, but what did I care about nice green trees and plants in
other peoples' countries?
I've never really understood why anyone would care about someone
else's rain forest. After all, the closest thing Americans have to a real
rain forest is probably the swamps of Louisiana and Florida, both of which
are miles and miles of useless terrain. And you never see anyone moaning
and groaning about saving the swamp, except in sci-fi movies.
And when you see teh canned pictures of rain forests, everything's
all nice and arranged; all the little critters live in harmony and amazingly,
you almost always see a nice foot-path between the trees.
I guess the thing that always really irked me most about the
rain forest-huggers was the contention that special little critters lived
in the jungle, critters that deserved to be saved from man's evil depradations.
Obviously, those folks haven't spent too much time in the rain
forest; I have. They're full of special little critters, to be sure, but
most of those special little critters want to have you for dinner, or chew
up your gear, or at least leave painful, annoying bite-marks all over you.
If you ever decide to visit a real rain forest, here's some advice:
carry a case of Avon Skin-So-Soft (keeps the bugs away) and take a sword,
machete, axe or tank to cut a path.
Up until now, anyone wanting to chop down, burn up or nuke the
rain forests had my vote. After all, the smoke would never bother us, right?
Cough-cough!