Non-Smokers Unite!

I've been accused of being a militant anti-smoker. It's true, I told my husband when I met him if he didn't stop smoking I wouldn't date him (unfiltered Camels, no less). I jumped right on the anti-smoking wave in the 80's when I stopped allowing friends and family to smoke in my home. Although I was the only person in my family who didn't smoke, as I've grown older my allergies will not tolerate cigarette smoke. I had to quit bowling and not that we did it a lot, but going to bars for a drink unless they have a ventilated separate room for non-smokers. If that isn't enough, I watched my mother's health fail and I mourned as she suffucated last year when she died of MRSA fueled pneumonia. She probably wouldn't have even contracted the deadly virus if her lungs hadn't been weakened by smoking related COPD.
But this post isn't going to be about the health effects of smoking - or even the environmental effects of the collective cancer agents-laced haze drifting into the atmosphere.
No, this is going to be about cigarette butts. They're everywhere. My husband went to the "big city" the other night and parked in a nearby lot and walked about a half block to a restaurant. There they were, in the median, littering the otherwise manicured patch of grass. It isn't just at this particular intersection, walk any street, anywhere (I noticed them all over the sidewalks in Munich this past summer) and you'll see them.
I walk with the dogs (when weather permits) along our remote country road. It's a rareity to see someone that doesn't live here, or isn't a weekender or a visitor. It's so remote, when we heard a siren yesterday morning we were baffled, until we figured out the sound was carrying for 2 miles from the main road.
In the summer, especially, when the weekenders and their families come to the lake, I stop and pick up litter along the road - paper cups, hamburger wrappers - and yes, butts. One day last fall, I even was disgusted to find someone had stopped right in the middle of the road to empty an entire ashtray onto the otherwise pristene landscape.
As we were on our evening walk yesterday on a beautiful 60 degree January day, my husband surveyed the blackened charred remains of past brush fire. "I wonder how that started," he said. Given the proximity to the road, we can only guess it was a careless smoker and a cigarette butt.
Besides being a fire hazard and just plain nasty, cigarette butts are not biodegradeable. The filter hangs around forever.
This is the reason my aunt, who is a smoker, will not allow visitors to her home to throw their butts onto her land. It's also the reason I told the builder's helper to quit doing it while they were building our house - and the reason I will nicely ask the FedEx lady the next time she is here not to do it when she comes to deliver a package.
Please, smokers, even if you can dismiss the health and other environemental concerns, please at least deposit your butts in a proper trash bin. If you're a non-smoker - or a concerned smoker - please help by picking up butts anytime you see them where they're not supposed to be.
If you would like to know more interesting facts on butts, there's actually a website for you to read: http://www.cigarettelitter.org/