LETTER TO THE EDITOR: Congrats to council for voting down smoking ban

I wanted to congratulate the Florence City Council for voting down the smoking ban.

I realize that this puts me in line for criticism but that’s fine.

I’m 82 years old and smoked from a teenager until 1972, but I realize that if I still smoked the “guns” would be pointed at me.

I’m grateful for those eating places that have smoking sections and when asked “smoking or non-smoking,” I say it doesn’t matter.

I know there are people who really have a problem with smoke due to certain health problems, and that should always be protected, and most smokers would certainly respect that.

My dad smoked a pipe, and he and my mother sat in the closed-in kitchen in the winter with the pipe smoke curling up in the rays of the sun, (when the rays came thru the window).

My mother said if second hand smoke would kill you “I should have been dead long ago.”

Both my parents were in their upper 80’s, mother 89 years and two months. Neither of them died from smoke related causes.

When people go out to eat, they like to sit and enjoy their meal and perhaps fellowship with friends afterward over a cigarette (if they smoke). Shouldn’t that be their right as free Americans.

Also, the abuses that have been put on smokers thru unreasonable increases in taxes, supposedly to raise more money but to encourage people to stop smoking which would reduce tax revenue.

We were taught in American history that freedom was a very big issue, and that Patrick Henry is well remembered for his statement “As for me, give me liberty or give me death.”

A highly respected man by those of his acquaintance was said to have been asked about these people that continue to smoke and he is quoted as saying “prejudice is worse.”

Of course, people would be better off not to drink, smoke or use drugs, prescription or otherwise, but we seem to have forgotten some of the things that touched our hearts in years past about being Americans.

It has been said that “America (the United States) is great because America is good and if she stops being good she will stop being great.”

An old radio program back in the days before television called “Mr. District Attorney” always included as part of the program “And it shall be my duty as district attorney, not only to prosecute to the limit of the law, all persons accused of crimes perpetrated within my district, but to protect with equal vigor the rights and privileges of all its citizens.”

A Lee Grimsley Jr., D.C.
Lake City