Editor,
It seems there has been a lot of talk around campus and in the Opinion section of the Daily Lobo about a proposed on-campus outdoor smoking ban.
This seems a little bit fascist to my freewheeling, unbridled Southwestern sensibilities.
In fact, to be honest, I don't believe in laws at all, but rather that the conventions and mechanisms of social harmony should be maintained through an individual sense of moral obligation, community and compassion rather than a fear of legal consequence.
All too rapidly, our society is becoming a soft despotism, as the most trivial and minute of personal daily decisions are being wrenched from the lackadaisical hand of the prescription-drugged and television-hypnotized individual and are becoming the realm of government bureaucracy.
Examples of decisions - such as one's ability to smoke in public - which should be individual decisions with respect to community welfare, represent the growing rift of isolation in American society.
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A society where, if a portly business fellow clad in a three-piece suit and spectacles enjoys a cigar to which perchance you possess an allergy or general distaste, you do not go and ask him to desist. Instead, you ask your government to ask him to desist.
This is the perfect modern application of Alexis de Tocqueville's "tree in the road" analogy of American self-reliance, in which a scenario is proposed of a street in which a tree has fallen, blocking the way.
According to Tocqueville, in America, the people of immediate interest in the blocked road will gather and effect its removal. In 1831, when Tocqueville visited America, his conclusions were optimistic. He saw a thriving democracy in the town hall forums of New England and the grass-roots community interest groups.
But to what was this attributed? It was attributed to these most essential aspects of self-sufficiency, personal sovereignty and self-governance.
The actual issue of whether it is dirty, unhealthy, uncouth or super cool to smoke in public is fairly trivial.
This is an issue of the deepening American despotism, and a sign of the increasing conditioning of the American populous toward a state of complacence and apathy.
Luis Martinez
UNM student
