Carrie Bartkowiak v. 5.0

This post comes about from a heartfelt experience today while blog browsing.

DeeDee over at It Coulda Been Worse made a wonderful post about how one of her daughters is pretending she’s smoking, and DeeDee’s having a hard time figuring out how to nip this in the bud. Her mother died of lung cancer, and it’s a subject dear to her heart.

Her post isn’t what upset me - it was a comment left by a lady named Patois:

I take the Gladys Kravitz approach. We heartily ridicule anyone smoking near us. (Don’t try this on a mean city street!) We point them out, we say it’s a nasty habit, we say it stinks, we say it’s filthy. The kids know that. I’m a recovering smoker (just like I’m a recovering Catholic). It’s everything the kids and I say it is. And it’s so hard to not step outside and light one up when I’m driven crazy by the kids.

I’m with Marybeth — the smokers know it all. If approached, I’m sure they’d tell the kids they’re dead-on target. (Again, don’t try this on a mean city street. We’re in the ‘burbs.)

I was floored.

Yes, smokers know that it stinks.
Yes, they know that if they continue to smoke, they’ll most likely get lung cancer.

And still, they smoke.
For some it’s a choice, for others it’s an addiction that they have desperately tried to break but cannot.

They certainly don’t need a mother and her children (a mother who is encouraging her children) to be heartily ridiculing them. How is this going to help?

Would this mother allow her children to “heartily ridicule” someone who was sucking their thumb? If not, why not? How about someone who is in a wheelchair? If not, why not?

Because ridiculing these people is bad. We don’t know why a child or teenager - or even a grown person - would be sucking their thumb. Perhaps they’re just shy. Perhaps it’s a habit they never grew out of. Perhaps their home life is so tumultuous that the only comfort they can find for themselves is in thumb-sucking.
The person in the wheelchair: perhaps they were born not able to walk. Perhaps they got drunk and crashed a car into a tree. Perhaps some drunk crashed into *them*. Perhaps they’ve got MS.

We don’t know, and therefore, we don’t ridicule.
Just as we don’t know what caused a person to start smoking, how often they’ve tried to quit, how badly they want to quit (or not), and how far along in their own path to cancer that they are.

Teaching your children that you don’t ridicule people and make fun of them, but then encouraging and allowing them to do it just for this one segment of the population is hypocrisy. Children watch what you do, and pay attention to that far more than what you say. Patois knows this, that’s why she stresses not once, but twice, that she only does this in the suburbs. She wouldn’t dare do it in the city, where people are far more likely to take *her* to task for it.

That in itself should tell her, deep down, that this is not right. If it’s an action that you wouldn’t be proud of doing *anywhere*, then it’s an action you shouldn’t be doing. Period. Much less teaching your children to do it as well.

I read a lot into Patio’s comment, who knows if it’s correct or not. She says she’s an ex-smoker. But there’s a choice there; are you going to be an ex-smoker or a rabid ex-smoker? She says it’s still hard for her not to light up, so evidently it was hard for her to quit. Yet she’s going to make fun of those people who are still trapped in that addiction? She’s been there. Not being there anymore does not give her the right to be so self-righteous that she can hold herself above others and look down her nose and proclaim them to be “filthy”. I truly believe that this woman has an incredible amount of guilt and anger towards herself for smoking for so long. The ridicule that she so gleefully doles out to other smoking sufferers is actually ridicule for herself. It’s a common psychological trick called transferrence; where you point out and lash out at traits in others that you hold yourself, yet hate. You hate yourself; and instead of facing your own traits and accepting them, forgiving yourself for them, working from today forward… you lash out at anyone else you see who has those same traits/tendencies/habits/quirks. It’s a very convenient way to ignore what is going on inside your own heart and mind and take the focus off of yourself.

I grew up with 6 grandparents, due to one pair of them getting a divorce before I was born. 3 of them died from cancer that began in their lungs. It is a horrible, ravaging, painful, wasting-away type of death.
Both of my parents have smoked all of my life -my Dad has quit many times and has currently been quit for 1 1/2 years- and my father has developed emphysema. My mother is developing it now. She still smokes. She tried to quit earlier this year, and just couldn’t do it.

When I read Patois’ comments I imagined her and her children standing there pointing fingers and laughing at my grandmother. Standing with my grandmother and hearing the word “filthy” come floating over the air along with laughter.
Upset? Yeah, I got pretty upset.

My grandmother suffered repeated beatings at the hands of her second husband for my entire life. He threatened to kill her many times. The only time she was permitted to leave the house was if she was going out with my Mom and I, or if she were going to bingo; and even then he would check the mileage on her car when she came home to make sure she hadn’t gone anywhere else. He would get drunk, angry, and then decide that she was just so worthless that he was going to kill her, and he’d go get a gun and point it at her for hours while she begged for her life and he screamed at her telling her how worthless she was. I stood in front of that gun once.

My grandmother was not filthy. She was not stupid. She knew full well what those cigarettes were doing to her. Perhaps she wanted it to happen even quicker, to get her out of that hell she lived in. But when she was upset and crying, shaking so hard she couldn’t hold a knife to cook that bastard dinner, a cigarette was the only thing that could calm her down enough to stop the shaking.

Actually, now that I think about it, I lost 4 grandparents to cancer; I remember now that the bastard died from a fast-spreading cancer that also began in his lungs. I don’t think about his death much; I’m just thankful that he’s gone. He did more than beat my grandmother - he molested my mother and me as well.

So believe me when I say that if I were ever to overhear a mother encouraging her children to talk about my grandmother’s smoking, or my smoking, or my mother’s smoking, and I heard words like “filthy” and “nasty” coming out of their mouths, I’d be sure to walk right up to them and have a little talk.

I don’t care if you are a recovering smoker. I don’t care if you’ve been there. I don’t care if you’re lucky enough to never have picked up the habit and not smoked one cigarette in your life. You don’t know the hell that someone is going through, the life they’re leading that makes them continue smoking. And you have no right - NO RIGHT - to ridicule them. Your comments are not going to encourage the person to stop smoking; if anything, it will make the person just dig their heels in deeper and do it just out of spite and defense. I’ve seen this firsthand.

What’s worse is that you’re teaching your children to do something so cruel and ugly. You can say “you don’t point fingers and laugh at people”, but when you do it right in front of them and encourage them to do it as well, you’re teaching them that it’s perfectly all right to ridicule.

I do realize that I may be taking this all to heart too much, but it really got to me. Think what you want about someone, but to teach your kids this? Kids are natural finger-pointers on their own. They’ll call something out in complete innocence, regardless of how much it will embarrass us. Those are beautiful teaching opportunities. Most people who are the recipients of this innocent, loud observation from a small person are understanding. They know kids. But they do fully expect the parent to talk to the child and teach them. Not encourage them to continue the behavior.

No matter what demons you are wrestling with yourself, putting your children out there as your personal demon-slayers is just wrong. You’re teaching them something you know is wrong, you’re inviting a very scary situation to happen (imagine my drunk, wife-beating, child-molesting grandfather hearing this woman and her children snickering about him - it wouldn’t be pretty), and you’re putting your children at risk.

Deal with your demons yourself. Privately. Look at what you’re lashing out at, and find out what it is within you that you’re really angry about. Deal with that. Forgive yourself for it. And please, please, watch what you teach your children. These kids can be the compassionate leaders of tomorrow, or they can be the finger-pointing, ridiculing bullies that the rest of us avoid.

It’s our choice what we teach our kids, but the whole world has to live with our choices.

What do you think? I wanna know! Please leave a comment :)
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