The idea you see in the whole corporate-offices-ban-
tobacco-products-of-any-kind-on-their-property thread is interesting because it shows how American social movements work and how early gutlessness can come back to bite you later.
A long, long time ago (I think it was during the Reagan administration), corporations decided that they would start drug-testing programs and therein lies an idea that is finally having a greater impact on more people today than it ever has before.
A great many Americans fail to understand their constitutional rights, and what those rights mean in a broader context and this happy circumstance has allowed companies large and small to confuse the word, employer with the word, owner.
The Constitution and the Bill of Rights protect American citizens from unlawful search and seizure with respect to home, property and person. When the government needs to violate that protection, it requires due process of law, like a search warrant issued by authorities who have formal, documented reasons to suspect someone may have committed some specific illegal act. Corporations are a different animal.
In the mid-eighties, companies were encouraged to weed out drug-use (and undo the philosophical heresies of the Sixties and Seventies) by tying drug-testing to the implied contract in the employer/employee relationship.
This meant that your boss could hold himself to an information-standard with respect to your behavior that the government didnt and couldnt give itself. Encouraged by the blessing of successive right-wing administrations and the lack of real outcry or organized opposition, any employer can now consider it his right to demand the kind of insight into your life that even the FBI considered beyond its reach and demanding the right to control your most intimate behavior while on their property is only a small extension of that idea.
This brings us to today and American Social movements.
If youre reading this, you can pat yourself on the back and say that youre living through an intense phase in American History and its latest social movement. Its a movement with all the passion of the movement that ended slavery, or the one that gave women the right to vote, or the one that brought about the miserable idiocy of Prohibition.
The anti-smoking movement is driven by the nasty triumphalist energy that can only come from knowing that your belief-system makes you better than people who dont share it. Movements like that never take the inconsistency, inaccuracy or unfairness of what they say into account: your race, sexuality or ethnic origin are strictly no ones business as far as corporate America is concerned; so long as youre sober on the job, you can drink all the booze you like, but nicotine addiction is fair game and being a smoker, or now even a vaper, is creating a situation where it is beginning to carry all the stigma of being black in Alabama in the fifties--non-smokers consider it their right to tell you to sit in the back of the bus.
Were becoming a society that is opening the door to peoples worst impulses--one where you might be a complete idiot, and still count yourself as smarter and better than any smoker--offering its participants the pleasure of being part of a mechanism that gives them the power to control other peoples actions without their consent and without compensation.
In the end, it isnt anything like universal health care because it has nothing whatsoever to do with todays government, or even with the Reagan administration that refused to slap down companies that made a violation of their employees privacy a condition of their employment. The fault is ours because, way back when, we did nothing whatsoever to stop it.
Big Brother is alive and well, but he works for the boardroom.
