Letter: Is smoking cigarettes good for you?

Posted 10/16/18

To the editor:

Fifty years ago the tobacco industry went to great lengths to manipulate us into believing that smoking was safe. Using their own words (from a 1969 industry memo): "Doubt is our …

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Letter: Is smoking cigarettes good for you?

Posted

To the editor:

Fifty years ago the tobacco industry went to great lengths to manipulate us into believing that smoking was safe. Using their own words (from a 1969 industry memo): "Doubt is our product since it is the best means of competing with the 'body of fact' that exists in the minds of the general public. It is also the means of establishing a controversy.” The same "create doubt" con has also been applied to acid rain, asbestos, DDT, mercury, lead, gun safety and climate change — all prioritizing profit over human life.

The war against climate science has been ongoing for decades and the fossil-fuel industry has its own secret industry memos acknowledging that climate change exists and that humans caused it. Predictably, and revealing their true "corporate responsibility," they chose to counterattack truth and create climate change doubt. Why aren’t we told to doubt our MRI results, hurricane projections, or the sciences behind our smartphones? What is so unique about climate science that requires us to doubt it? No doubt you can answer that yourself ...

Doubt is also used to distract and weaken by dividing us. We are increasingly being told to doubt each other because of race, religion, gender, age, lifestyle, disabilities, economic standing, geographic location, etc. All 325 million of us are continually herded into only "the left" or "the right" and then pitted against each other. We are at the point where many have abdicated critical thought and no longer care what is said or what is done, only who said it or who did it. 

For example, if the president suddenly embraced climate change, then the deniers would no longer deny nor would they question why they were lied to in the first place. Unfortunately for everyone, atoms will do what they have always done and no last-minute legislation, no finger pointing, and no god will stop them.

Those who tell us to doubt each other also tell us to doubt "We the people" and to sacrifice ourselves for the ongoing accumulation of wealth by the few. We continually fall for the "free market," "rugged individualism," and "trickle-down economics" deceptions as our money is shifted to the wealthy and then promptly pulled out of the economy. Years have been spent nurturing a discontent of our “oppressive government,” with as much effort put into criticizing it as is to weaken it. We are being swayed to doubt the rule of law and government institutions, convincing some to gleefully watch as the corrupted Supreme Court reinterprets the Constitution to benefit the wealthy and hand them the reins of democracy.   

All these attempts to weaken the working class over the past 50 years have come from those who are driven by greed, power lust, or ideology. Meanwhile, the rest of us were driven only to be good Americans, trusting just about everyone as we plodded along and contributed to a stronger America.  

As the attacks continue it is important to remember that there is a difference between "being a divided country" and "a country that is being divided,” though neither are good. Don’t fall for it. Our country was nothing like this just a few decades ago and time is quickly running out because the brashness of the attacks is increasing, the damage is adding up, our shock is wearing off, and they will not stop. 

Ian Mitchell

95 Dianne Ave.

Portsmouth

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