DRIVER'S SIDE DIATRIBE
By Al Vinikour   

Today I’m going to revisit a topic I haven’t done in quite a while but I feel it’s something that needs “re-scussing” as we used to say in my beloved home state of Indiana. The subject is people who smoke in cars when there are kids inside, and even worse, infants.

What raised my hackles (and by the way, I was a freelance gynecologist during my early adult years and I don’t ever recall seeing the word “hackles” in any of the Classics Illustrated medical books I studied) was my trip to Wal Mart the other day (Hey! I like to mingle with the common folks occasionally).

I parked kind of far away from the door so I could pretend I was getting exercise and as I was walking up the aisle a car was headed the wrong way. Jose Feliciano could see that all the cars were facing the same way so why would anyone do that. My answer came as I finally moved over to let this idiot pass; this woman who looked like Honey Boo Boo’s mother was behind the wheel with what looked like a Virginia Slim dangling out of her mouth and sitting in the passenger’s side was this guy who looked like he couldn’t spell “cat” if you spotted him the C and the A. He was smoking as well but had his window lowered a bit so he could apparently flick his ashes out and let some of the smoke emit from the interior of the beautifully rusted-out old Taurus.

This was bad enough to qualify for the next “Wonders of Wal Mart” e-mail that occasionally makes the rounds. But I could see a little baby in a bassinet in the back seat of the vehicle.

Here’s this poor little person laying there trying to develop lungs it may need as it grows older and those two buffoons sitting in the front seat are doing all they can to subject this child to such an infusion of second-hand smoke that it will probably have a permanent effect on the baby’s development. In the meantime, Sadie and Goober are puffing away having the time of their soon-to-be-over-but-not-quick-enough lives as they drive the wrong way down a one-way parking lane as they prepare to visit the Monte Carlo of their existence.

Let me make something clear at the onset; this diatribe is by no means a put-down of the poor. Not by a long shot. I not only embrace poverty but am heavily-involved with its nuances. The entire focus of my rant is what that innocent infant is going through.

Most of you know my brainwaves good enough by now to figure what’s coming next; that’s right, Edmund…it’s time to administer punishment. At the very least a person who smokes with a vehicle that contains children — and especially a baby — should be yanked out of the car by a Mountain Man, tied to a tree, brushed from head-to-toe with honey and somebody in the Mountain Man’s posse should throw rocks at a Momma Bear and her two cubs who happen to be sauntering by.

But, just to show that I can be persuaded to give someone a second chance, for those first-timers who present a good-enough defense, they should be given a much-lighter penalty. They should have their eyes pecked out by rabid crows and then have a handful of fire ants stuffed inside the socket where their eyeballs used to live.

I’m not trying to become one of the “Sin Police” whose ranks seem to be swelling so much. However, I do NOT condone what amounts to attacks on innocent children and subjecting them to being a captive audience in a vehicle filled with smoke; it’s akin to child abuse.

My own lunacy that’s so easily diagnosed by reading my rants should be proof enough that being in a closed environment of smoke can cause some serious medical problems. Major universities could have generations of studies just by examining me and my thinking and who knows how much of it was caused by my own father who always smoked in cars and other confined places when I was a kid.

I smoked for eight years, beginning when I was in college. But I NEVER smoked in a car that was transporting children, or even worse, babies. Just to show you how concerned I am about little lives, whenever I see “yutes” as my intellectual hero Joe Pesci used to call young people, I want to rescue them, put them in a safe place and then pour gasoline on the vehicle that contains the miscreants who are heartless and dumb enough to puff up in a car where innocent children are subjected to second-hand smoke as their little lungs are in the development phase.

At that point those people are either going to IMMEDIATELY quit smoking…or they’re going to die trying.

Just like the Pied Piper of Hamlin spent his life trying to remove the rats from Ireland, so, too, is yours truly trying to keep people from smoking in a vehicle containing children. Life is tough enough without starting it with lung damage caused through no fault of their own.

And for those who whine that they’ve tried everything to quit smoking but nothing seems to work, I have a fool-proof method that I guarantee will bring results: walk inside a crowded truck stop wearing a T-Shirt that says, “Those that can do; those who can’t drive 18-wheelers.”