Rant #3,054: Smoke Gets In Your Eyes

I did exactly what I wanted to do during yesterday’s Dr. Martin Luther King Day holiday.

I relaxed, did a little work, watched the New York Knicks game, and didn’t do too much else.

It was the perfect holiday for me.

The only downer was that the Knicks lost in overtime to the Toronto Raptors, but otherwise, it was a good day.

How was your holiday?

But holidays are short-lived, and today, I am back to the grind.

I have to take my son back and forth to work, and I know that I will get some stories that I have edit and/or rewrite.

Look, I know that it isn’t very much like my old grind after a holiday—where I had to physically go back to work—but it is the best I can do right now, or maybe even for the rest of my life.

And yesterday, unlike other days that I am home as a semi-retired person, I had a chance to watch a bit of TV, whether it was that Knicks game I told you about, a few old sitcoms like “Leave It To Beaver” and “The Donna Reed Show,” and, of course, the news—both local and national—which I always manage to watch, holiday or no holiday.

But watching a bit more television than normal found me seeing a bit more commercials and there is one local commercial that really riles me.

If you live in the New York Metropolitan Area, you almost certainly know the commercial, and if you don’t, just bear with me while I describe it to you.

(I can’t find it on YouTube to actually show it to you.)

The ad has a title kid singing the song “Clementine” while his mother proceeds through her daily ritual of lighting up a cigarette … and her progression from healthy, young mom to being on a ventilator as payback for her actions.

You know the song. It is a kids’ tune, but it has been turned into a maudlin dirge by aligning its almost profane words into the focus of the commercial:

“Oh my darling, oh my darling
Oh my darling Clementine
You are lost and gone forever
Dreadful sorry, Clementine.”

And the kid singing this song puts extra melodrama on the “You are lost and gone forever” portion of the lyrics.

Now, nobody is going to argue that the message is a wrong one.

Smoking is bad—in particular for women—and nobody should smoke anything at all, tobacco or otherwise, because it affects the body negatively and can lead to cancer and other health problems.

We know this due to years and years of research on the matter.

But the message is two-faced, in particular in New York.

The message is don’t smoke tobacco, but you can smoke marijuana without any consequences.

As you probably know, New York State—as are the surrounding states in the New York Metropolitan Area—is gearing up to making recreational pot use legal, as is recreational tobacco use.

But you can’t rant against smoking tobacco and embrace smoking pot at the same time, but that is exactly what New York State is doing.

We have put the cart before the horse in states where pot smoking is legal, because we don’t yet know what the effects on the body of smoking weed are, although what we do know—including its effects on the brain—are not good.

Nor do we have a test that will clearly tell us whether drivers who are pulled over by police for a driving infraction were influenced by the use of marijuana.

All those that support the legalization see is green, and yes, the tax revenues from legal put sales will probably blind them to the fact that whether you smoke tobacco or pot, you might just be putting yourself in harm’s way.

Yes, marijuana has been shown to have some medicinal benefits, but do they outweigh the overall fact that smoking anything is probably, in the long run, bad for you?

So anti-smoking messages that the state creates to scare people into not smoking really are dulled by the fact that we look down at those who smoke cigarettes, but we are now congratulating those who smoke joints.

It makes no sense … unless you are a New York legislator who supports legalized recreational put use.

Sure we have legal tobacco use, we have legal alcohol use, and now, we have legal pot use, but why are we not following our own advice, such as like we supposedly did with the coronavirus shot where we were told to “follow the science” when deciding whether to get the shots or not?

We aren’t doing it here with legal pot use … all we are doing is following the green, and when is that ever the proper way to view things?

I guess we are going to eventually have other kids singing “Clementine” to their parents, too, but it will also be directed at those who smoke weed.

You can’t have it both ways, but somehow, New York State thinks that you can.

Heck, I could have been that Clementine kid about 50 years ago, as I saw my own grandfather wither away and die from his smoking habit … and whether you are talking about tobacco or pot, yes, it is a habit.

New York State is well known for having some of the most virulent and direct anti-smoking advertising in the country, where ads across the years have even shown the insides of someone who is dying of cancer due to smoking.

Smoking anything cannot be good for you, and the green veil that the state is trying to put over our eyes regarding pot smoking makes those commercials into jokes, sending a mixed message to viewers—including kids—that simply does not compute.

And now we have kids ingesting pot-laced gummies … sorry, New York State, you have opened a Pandora’s Box of problems that can never be closed again … and you did it not based on the science, but on the green.

Smoke may be getting in your eyes, and you cannot see the forest for the trees.