On June 6th, I made the small gesture of going to the Bloomington City Council meeting in support of a large group of people representing bars and fraternal clubs that are suffering big losses of revenue due to the Bloomington smoking ban. Yes, Minneapolis, Hennepin and Ramsey counties have all passed similar bans, but Bloomington struck the first blow.

The meeting started at 6:45, in Bloomington's truly massive new city center facility. It's so large that I drove past for a couple of miles, looking for what I imagined the city offices would look like for a city with a population of only 85,000 people. If you've ever attended a council meeting, you know how painfully slow progress is. I expected that, but by 10:15, when the building doors were locked (meaning I could no longer go out to have a smoke and then return), I gave up and went home.

Those I went to support... residents, citizens of Bloomington, finally got to speak at ONE A.M., I was told later. The 40 people who waited all that time to speak... NO... to beseech, to plead, to beg their elected officials, were then PERMITTED to tell their tragic stories of business, job and income loss to themselves and their businesses. Don't take my word for it... you can watch what happened on webcast, by going here, then selecting webcast for the 6/06/05 meeting, and then selecting Public Comment 2. I watched all of the remaining meeting, getting angrier by the minute.

Whether you watch the webcast or not, I want to paint a proper picture of what occurred. Our political environment, even at the local level, has decayed to the point, because we haven't stood up for our rights as citizens, that city officials can literally do any damned thing they choose, and regularly do so. Like pathetic slaves, we have allowed them to assume power over every aspect of our lives. They can, with a simple majority vote, take our property for something they consider more important, or inflict rules that destroy families and businesses. They are OUT OF CONTROL with power, and we ALLOWED them, through our neglect and an unwillingness to stand up for our rights, to just grab and inflict that power on us.

Our citizenry is WHIPPED. If you watch the webcast, you'll see grown men, most of them much larger and tougher than me, humbling themselves to these 7 elected officials who are supposed to be - lest we forget - protecting the rights of Bloomington citizens. These citizens come in hopeful supplication, controlling their emotions carefully so as not to offend and perhaps ruin their meager chance of relief. Speak to these same people privately and you'll hear anger and frustration that is barely under control, because their livelihoods are being ruined by the actions of this city council. As if to CONCEDE the power of the council, these citizens waited for almost 4 hours... to implore the council to even LISTEN to what the council has done to their lives.

I don't give a damn whether the Bloomington city council has a LEGAL right to pass a smoking ban... for them to do so is IMMORAL... it is WRONG. If they have the legal right, then the law is wrong and must be changed, but even WITH the legal right, they could have chosen NOT to pass a ban.

The ban (or any other smoking ban) is a blatant violation of property rights... the right to do what you choose on your own property as long as you harm nobody else. Regardless of what you believe to be the truth about the health issue, the property rights issue is FAR more primary, and takes precedence. There were smoking establishments, non-smoking establishments, and mixed-usage establishments, so every citizen had a choice. The city council took that choice away. There is NOTHING right about that.

You will hear council members describe how thoroughly they study an issue before ruling... accumulating large amounts of evidence from various sources. It's possible that they believe they are doing a good job of finding the truth, and then acting in a responsible way to remove risk. There is a lot of contrary evidence available, and much of it comes from groups we SHOULD be able to trust; large organizations that claim to have only public health as a goal. However, it does not take a lot of investigation to discover that these groups have overriding financial interests that lead them to deceive.

Ask yourself... if the evidence is, as such groups claim, clear that smoking and secondhand smoke causes health damage, why don't they simply put their efforts into convincing the public, rather than directing their efforts toward government, trying to FORCE all of us into submission?

THAT is the core of this issue... who will decide how you live your life? Before the smoking bans, each of us decided for ourselves. As customers, we chose whom to give our business too, and business owners chose what sort of place to offer to the public. Every one of us had choice. Business owners, to attract both smokers and non-smokers, went to great lengths to accommodate both, with powerful ventilation systems, separate spaces, and even divided smoking/non-smoking hours. Everyone involved made his or her own decision, and we worked out accomodations to satisfy everyone. That IS the way a free society works.

When a city council imposes a smoking ban, regardless of their reasoning, they are replacing the choice of all citizens with their own. They're in effect claiming that they are better able to judge the evidence, and are imposing their will on all of us... obliterating our choices. They are telling us that they know better how we should live our lives... that we are just too ignorant to choose how to live, without their wisdom to protect us. Stupid citizenry, wise leaders.

The root of smoking bans has nothing whatsoever to do with health. It's about power, about force, about coercion... it's about a few people being able to control how the rest of us may live. Each of us may try to convince others that our position is the correct one. When someone... ANYONE... chooses to FORCE others to their position RATHER than convincing them, they are violating the rights of those individuals. Either their evidence is not convincing, or they believe the others are too stupid to understand, but they are doing exactly what dictators do - forcing you to comply with their wishes.

When are we going to say ENOUGH? When are we going to stand up as citizens and tell government officials, at all levels, to get the hell out of our lives and leave us alone to live as we choose? Are we a nation of sheep, meekly going where we're herded, eating what we're allowed to eat because we're too dumb to judge for ourselves?

Every day, our various levels of government forcibly destroy some people to reward others, as they are with some bar and restaurant owners and employees. In so doing, they are damaging the lives of ALL of us by imposing their will over our freedom to choose.

Imposing a smoking ban SHOULD, if citizens weren't already so whipped, cause a riot against city hall. It certainly would have earlier in our nation's history, because it is a wrongful oppression of the people. It is so inimical to the foundations of our free nation that we should ALL be up in arms, taking this occasion to put elected officials back on their heels... as the public servants they pretend to be, rather than the petty dictators they act like.

If we do NOT stop them, they will assume that they DO have the right to impose anything they choose, and we will have nobody to blame but ourselves. If we concede control of our lives to them, why shouldn't they take it?