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Originally Posted by shut the front door
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Well, looks like I will be canceling my reservations for a Bluegrass Cruise on Royal Caribbean next January. I have until the first of October to do that, so perhaps I will wait to see what happens.
When I was hired as a professor at a state university in Pennsylvania in 1986, faculty were allowed to smoke in their offices and in the classrooms. Students were allowed to smoke in the hallways but not in the classrooms. Many ashtrays were provided. A few years later, students weren’t allowed to smoke in the building at all, but they could smoke in their dorm rooms, and teachers could still smoke in their offices, though no longer in the classroom. Then, around 1990, I think, not even teachers could smoke in their offices. No smoking in the building at all. A “freedom” to exercise a personal health choice was removed. I thought the teachers who smoked would go on strike or something. After all, all of our union leaders smoked. But they didn’t strike. They lived with it. By the time I retired last year, only a few teachers smoked, and they had one little area outside where they could do that. Students couldn’t smoke in their rooms. I’ve never smoked a cigarette in my life, but I’m interested in how the “freedom” to smoke came to be considered less important than the “freedom” to not have to breath second hand smoke. How did non-smokers end up having more power so quickly, and without bloodshed? Are “freedoms” rather flexible and slippery?
I moved to Rwanda to work in 1974. To enter (and also to deplane in Nairobi to switch planes), I had to have not only my U.S. Passport but my yellow international Vaccination Passport. When I moved to Beijing to work in 1983, again I was not allowed in without that Vaccination Passport. I always kept it with my U.S. Passport. I still have it, though I haven’t kept it up to date. Anyone who used to work in Africa or Asia in past decades knows what I’m talking about. Needing an international Vaccination Passport for foreign travel is nothing new. Is that more of an abuse of our freedoms than needing a U.S. Passport for foreign travel? Is it more of an abuse of our freedoms than going through a security line at the airport and having our bags x-rayed and perhaps being frisked?