There are so very many wackaloons in this world. This past week a disgruntled tobacco farmer ground DC traffic to a halt by driving his John Deere into a pond on the Mall and threatening to set off explosives-- all in order to bring attention to the plight of starving and suffering tobacco farmers.
Now let's back up a minute here-- they're asking for OUR sympathy? No way bucko-- your past success was built on the death and dying of millions of people.
First of all, do none of these farmers realize that they're raising a crop which goes to create a product which has no other main purpose than addiction and only causes sickness? It's sick, if you ask me. If they had any kind of a conscience they'd change their business. And as for the argument that it's been a family business back to colonial days, forget it. Listen up guys-- your ancestors didn't have the information you have now. Theirs was a sin of ignorance, yours is a sin of negligence.
I'm sure they've had family members sicken and die from tobacco usage-- what's not adding up for them here?
Secondly, I know that even the dullest person in the world had to have seen the decline of the tobacco industry coming. After all, the government can't give subsidies for a product that does nothing but kill its citizens, right? (Ahem... we'll ignore that last statement.) I can't actually see the realism in Philip Morris-- oh ahem, Altria-- trying to defend the product either. They know damn well what it does.
These people are wacko. If they're so hung up on tobacco, let's not subsidize them, let's create a mandatory consumption for each family member who helps produce it. Let them try that on for size for a couple of years, and if they've survived and when they get a day free from treatments for lung cancer and emphysema, then I'll listen to their arguments for their way of life.
