Michael McFadden, author of Dissecting Antismokers’ Brains, wrote the following as a comment on Frank Davis’s blog. We thought it was so uplifting that we pinched it for our New Year Message.
Our thanks to Michael for permission to reproduce it here, and for all he has done, and continues to do, in the fight against smoking bans.
Raise a toast to 2012 – The Year of the Swarm!
Thanks to people like Frank, as well as Dave, and Dick, and Pat, and Leg, and Devil, and Rambler, and Mark, and Phil, and (I could go on for quite a while here before even leaving the realm of the bloggers and entering into the worlds of the F2Cs, SFDs, OoOBs, PPPRMs, CLASHes, Forces, Ticaps, SmokersClubs and all the rest of the talented and hardworking folks who are fighting these bans in their different places and different ways), I think those wasps are indeed actually growing more organized and more effective.
There are many angry, or at least seriously disgruntled, smokers out there, and every time the Antis take things one step further, even if it doesn’t affect an individual smoker in their own situation, it fuels the anger and the energy and the drive to DO something about it.
So far we’ve had trouble with that last step. The Antismokers have enormous amounts of money, and that money not only buys propaganda to terrorize the masses of innocent people out there who themselves become Antismokers only because virtually everything they hear in the media tells them they’re being made diseased by us; but also buys them the organizational ability to be effective even when they’re incompetent, simply by sheer force of numbers working separately on separate projects. The folks on our side unfortunately don’t have the luxury of that focused compartmentalism: we’re forced to be Jacks Of All Trades and simultaneously fight battles of pub bans, apartment bans, lies about harming our children even if we smoke only outside, taxes that would have sparked a revolution in earlier times, and even the right to have a place to live securely in our own ways and by our own choices.
Fortunately for us, we have some very, VERY good folks on our side and we’re gradually reaching out to more and more people who are realizing just how misguided the fanatical Crusaders are because of their excesses. And, also fortunately for us, we can depend upon the very fundamental nature of fanatical Crusaders to hand us our ultimate victory — simply because by their very nature they’re unable to see that they should stop and relish what they have, but will instead always and always grab for more.
Until they finally come crashing down.
Which they will.
– MJM
HAPPY NEW YEAR