LETTERS: FRENZY TO TAX THE POOR FOR SMOKING

To the editor:

The trend toward non-judgmentalism started in the wake of the great upheaval of the 1960s. As people tried to defend the values with which they had been socialized into the community of Americans, there ran into what was to become a classic counterpunch: the epithet of hypocrisy. If they criticized any behavior, the response from the value busters was that their own behavior was so replete with examples of failed principles that they had no position from which to criticize others. They were hypocrites.

Zealousness and non-judgmentalism are, not surprisingly, strained bedfellows. The zealous soul believes that criticism of other people's behavior is necessary if those misguided waifs are to be properly directed in correctly living their lives. A zealous person employs stealth technology: fuzz the real point (judging other people) so that it can't clearly be discerned.

Over time, the stealth judgmentalists have settled on four broad categories that can be used as objective cover for their decidedly subjective feelings about the way some of us behave. Those categories are health, safety, the environment and, of course, children. Attacks on tobacco, large personal vehicles, alcohol, freewheeling Internet activity, meat and other symptoms of individualism and excessive indifference to crises are all justified by nominally objective data.

Clearly this approach has the potential for serious fun. I have to believe that we're on the verge of something big when I see both responsible liberals and conservatives whipped into such a frenzy on one issue (tobacco) that the idea of taxing the pants off the poor seems indisputably good. Another excellent indicator is that of having the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration seriously trying to find ways to introduce egalitarianism into the morbidity rates in vehicle collisions, making sure each participant has an equal opportunity to be killed.

BOB RATHBURN

Piedmont