“We” aren’t at war in Iraq and Afghanistan. Our soldiers are.

Both wars individually have gone on longer than the U.S. involvement in the War of 1812, Mexican War, Civil War, Spanish-American War, World War I, World War II, Korean War, and Persian Gulf War. There doesn’t seem to be an end in sight for either.

Our fellow Americans are sweating and dodging, not just bullets, but bombs in the desert and on our behalves.

We know some of them personally. We miss them. We want them home.

You might be thinking: There’s nothing I can do to help stop the wars. That’s too big for me to tackle. We respectfully disagree, but that’s not the problem we’re talking about this Wednesday.

We owe our soldiers more than we can repay them. That’s the problem.

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Make Progress:

Diane was a student of mine at Ohio State. During the autumn quarter, Diane asked to be excused one Friday. Why? Because she was going to marry her boyfriend before he was shipped off to Iraq. Most of my students asked for time off because their friends needed to be bailed out of jail or because their Great Aunt conveniently died for the seventh time right before a paper was due. So, Diane’s request couldn’t possibly be refused. And she and her one-and-only did indeed wed.

After winter break, Diane signed up to be in another of my writing courses. This quarter, she seemed transformed. Some days she’d be filled with a kind of bubbly hope, the kind you see in people truly in love. Other days, she’d snap at fellow students, fall asleep in class (surprising since it started at 2 pm), and miss office hours appointments she’d scheduled with me. While discussing one of her papers, she started crying, dropped the paper in the trash can, and slowly walked out of the room backwards.

Come spring, I could tell Diane was a wreck. She pulled me aside on the second day of course to ask if it was okay if she left class every once and a while. I thought this was strange because my students never had to ask to go to the restroom, grab a snack, or get a drink of water. Hell, they could even take off for a minute or two to stretch if they needed to. “I need to leave sometimes,” she said, “to go outside and cry.”

And she did. Often. I’d say at least twice a week. Of course, she also missed at least one class a week. As the quarter moved along, Diane would forget to turn in assignments completely or would just turn in one page for a five-page essay. She’d pop by my office hours just to talk about the latest letter she’d received from her husband. She’d ask me to read them. Over the course of the year, I watched her weight dramatically drop to unhealthy levels.

Summer came and went, and the next autumn I saw Diane on campus the first day of classes. She smiled at me with her lips. I assumed her husband had returned. He hadn’t.

“I got divorced,” she told me. “I just couldn’t take it any more. I love him. But it stopped being worth it. The love, I mean.”

This is a cost of war. This is one side of war.

But this Wednesday, five year anniversary of the War in Iraq, we’re going to look closely at war from the other side. Please, we know it’s easier to do, but don’t look away.

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Wedding picture c/o this photographer.

One of the places that I desperately want to visit before I “become one with nature” is the Great Barrier Reef. A series of over 3,400 individual reefs and 900 islands along the east coast of Australia, it covers a distance longer than the west coast of the United States. That’s over 2,000 kilometers for those of you keeping score at home. It’s the world’s largest coral reef system. You can see it from space. Even “outer space.” It’s big, and beautiful. It’s one of the seven natural wonders of the world. And it’s dying.

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Make Progress:

Coral reefs all over the world are disappearing at an alarming rate. Over a quarter of the worlds reef systems have died or been severely damaged, and many scientists say that the remaining 75% will be gone in the next 30-50 years. Most of this destruction is human-related. That’s the bad news. The good news is that we can do something about it.

• Learn
• Watch
• Write
• Join and Donate
• Change

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Learn:

A bit of “founding fatherly” wisdom from James Madison:

Knowledge will forever govern ignorance; and a people who mean to be their own governors must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives.

In that spirit we’ve compiled a list of facts (the cold, hard kind) about what corals are and how they are beneficial. So arm yourselves with this good knowledge:

• Contrary to popular belief, corals are actually animals. They are made up of tiny polyps that live symbiotically with zooxanthellae algae that grow within the coral’s own tissue. This algae provides the coral with food and is what gives it color. These individual corals reproduce both sexually and asexually to form reefs.
• Reefs are home to 25 percent of all marine life equaling over two million different species.
• Ten percent of the world’s diet comes from reef fish and many poor and developing countries rely on local reefs for more than a quarter of their protein.
• Coral reefs are an enormous part of local and global economies. In the state of Florida alone coral-related tourism generated $4.4 billion, while creating over 70,000 jobs in a single year.
• Coral reef species are being used to create new antibiotics and antiviral medicines, as well as bone grafts. They also show promise for treating leukemia, skin, and other kinds of cancer.
• Large reefs protect shorelines from excessive wave action, violent storms and floods, helping to prevent death, erosion, and property loss.

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And here are some of the not-so-smiley causes of destruction:

• Dynamite and cyanide fishing: Yes, people use these two things to catch fish on the reefs. Their destructive impact should be obvious.
• Overfishing: The loss of a particular type of fish to the seafood trade can harm the ecological balance and be devastating to a coral reef.
• Runoff: Sediment from nearby development can get into the water and quickly destroy entire reef systems.
• Collection: Fish are caught and corals are harvested for the aquarium trade, calcium supplements, mortar and souvenirs.
• Global warming: A biggie. While many coral species are physically very hardy, a rise in ocean temperatures of only one or two degrees can cause massive coral bleaching, a condition where the algae dies off and the corals turn white and often die. In addition, warmer waters mean bigger hurricanes, which can pound coastal regions and do enormous damage to reefs.

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So now you know a little about these underwater paradises and their frailty, but to quote Goethe: “Knowing is not enough; we must apply!”

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Watch:

If you can tear yourself away from Wife Swap or the 43rd season of Survivor (maybe it only seems like that many) try turning the channel to PBS or The Discovery Channel. They quite frequently have documentaries about our underwater world and coral reefs in particular. For those able to get them in high definition, you’ll get a more realistic idea of how beautiful and unusual these animals are. But for those still using “rabbit ears” we’ll help you out.

If you want a “soft-polyp quicky,” the Planetary Coral Reef Foundation has put together this seven minute video that touches on the importance of coral reefs as well as dangers to reef systems and what is being done to prevent their destruction. Give it a look.

Coral Reef Adventure is an IMAX film that follows a husband and wife duo for ten months traveling from the Great Barrier Reef to the islands of Fiji and many other reefs. They concentrate on currently endangered reefs and the actions taken by ordinary people to save them. Narrated by Liam Neeson, this film has won much acclaim for its breathtaking cinematography and powerful message. You can rent it online or buy it here.

Jean-Michel Cousteau, son of the late ocean explorer Jacques Cousteau, has created a series with our friends at PBS called Ocean Adventures. One of these grabbed our attention (and someone else’s too), and we recommend it highly. Voyage to Kure takes Cousteau and his team to the Northwestern Hawaiian Island archipelago where they take a look at all of the marine life and the decline of many species and inspires the viewer to take action. How inspiring is it you ask? We’ll tell you in the next section. But first, buy it here from PBS or rent it online. It’s worth a look.

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Write:

Last year Jean-Michel Cousteau was invited to the White House for a private screening of the aforementioned Ocean Adventures: Voyage to Kure with the President and First Lady. They were so moved by the urgency of the crisis in the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands that President Bush immediately upgraded the 140,000 square miles of ocean landscape that contains 70% of the United States’ coral reefs from a reserve to a National Monument. National Monuments are not subject to approval by congress and therefore, the protections implied took effect immediately.

This was a huge step, which the President should be applauded for taking. But what about the other 30% of the coral reefs in the country, mainly located in the Florida Keys? We would like you to write a letter to the President showing your support for his action in Hawaii and asking him to take it a step further.

Below you’ll find an example. Feel free to edit it in any way before you sign and mail it. Or, since you are using one of those new-fangled computers, you could just copy, paste, and email it here with your name attached.

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Subject: Praise for action in Hawaii and calling for more.

Dear Mr. President,

I would like to take a moment to thank you for your quick and decisive action in declaring the Northwest Hawaiian Islands and the surrounding marine environment a National Monument. This was a huge step in preserving the beauty and magnificence of this vital region and animals that live there.

I am writing, however, to ask you to take similar action with the rest of our nation’s endangered coral reefs, which are located in the Florida Keys. The reefs surrounding the Keys are home to more than 100 species of corals and more than 400 species of fish. Both are a vital part of Florida’s economy as well, attracting over 4 million tourists annually. But they are threatened by pollution, overuse, and overfishing. They need more protection.

Please declare the Florida Keys’ coral reefs a National Monument so they will be there for our children and our grandchildren to enjoy and profit from in the years ahead.

Sincerely,

Your Name

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Join and Donate:

In doing research for this Wednesday’s topic I came across the websites of about 17 million organizations dedicated to this issue. Okay, that may be a slight exaggeration, but there are a lot. And that’s great news. But for those who want to get involved, how do they know which would be the most effective organization to donate their time, effort and money to? Well, I’ve visited all 17 million and here are the three that I most recommend along with their mission statements and links for you to lend a helping fin.

• Reef Relief

Reef Relief is a nonprofit membership organization dedicated to preserve and Protect Living Coral Reef Ecosystems through local, regional and global efforts.

Donate and join.

• Reef Check

The Reef Check Foundation is an international non-profit organization dedicated to conservation of two ecosystems: tropical coral reefs and California rocky reefs.

Donate and join.

• The Coral Reef Alliance

The Coral Reef Alliance (CORAL) is a member-supported, non-profit organization, dedicated to protecting the health of coral reefs by integrating ecosystem management, sustainable tourism, and community partnerships.

Donate and Join

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Change:

It’s the little things we do, the small actions we take as citizens, consumers, and stewards of our great green and blue orb that make the biggest differences, the most progress. It’s what the Progressive Wednesday community is all about, the little things that each of us can do. It might be hard to imagine, but there are everyday things that even the most landlocked Nebraskans can do to help solve this crisis. So here’s a list-behind-the-list of the everyday variety:

• For you reef-keepers like me out there, buy aquacultured animals. The Geothermal Aquaculture Research Foundation (GARF), located in Idaho, is a non-profit committed to coral propagation. They sell their corals online at very reasonable prices. Make sure your next “Nemo” and corals are “aquacultured” and lessen the burden on our natural reefs to supply our own indulgences.
  
• When you buy cement, brick or concrete, make sure it is not made from crushed coral.
• Do not buy bleached coral skeletons. Ever.
• Take care when diving. If you are one of the millions of divers that visit coral reefs each year, be sure to follow the rules and respect the reef. And don’t take anything!
• Eat fish that are in abundance. The Monterey Bay Aquarium’s Seafood Watch Program provides information on which fish are good to eat, what to avoid and good alternatives. They even break it down by region.
• Last but certainly not least, do your part to help fight global warming. You knew before how it affects you, now you know how it affects those below sea level. Renewable home energy, efficient driving, carpool… you know the drill, but it can’t be said enough.

Picture credit to this reef diver.

Some of you will remember Pete Seeger as a great folk singer and war protester.  He wrote or modified or sang such songs as “Where Have All the Flowers Gone” and “If I Had a Hammer” and “We Shall Overcome Someday.”

Pete is still alive, but 88 years old now and still as active as he can be.  He never drank or smoked.  He once resigned from The Weavers because they accepted an advertisement from a tobacco company.

He sang everywhere, to support the civil rights movement, to protest the Vietnam War, and to demand an end of pollution in the Hudson River.

He was called before the House Un-American Activities Committee and questioned about his patriotism and attitude toward communism.  He refused to answer.  He didn’t think it was American for him to be subjected to that; he was free to think what he pleased in this country.  His career suffered, and he was black-listed as a communist sympathizer, but he stood up for what he believed.

As I watched the show, I thought how much we need another Pete Seeger today.

We were told, at the time of the Viet Nam war, that if Viet Nam fell, then Thailand would fall, and one by one other nations would fall to communism like a row of dominoes.  We were told that North Vietnamese ships fired on one of our vessels in the Gulf of  Tonkin.  Now we know that even though the whole Vietnamese nation is united and communist, it is our trading partner.  And it has been admitted that the incident in the Gulf of Tonkin never happened.  The fears that we were fed were untrue and never happened.

When I think of how many people died for a war that accomplished nothing, it fills me with anguish.  Of course I admire the heroism of our troops who fought bravely, but they were led into a war we should never have fought.  If you have ever been to the Memorial for that war in Washington D.C., and seen the wall with tens of thousands of names on it, you were moved to the depth of your being.  I’m sure of that.

Now, in my opinion, we are in an even worse situation today in Iraq.  They never had weapons of mass destruction.  Saddam’s supporters have said he wouldn’t admit that because of fear that Iran would invade again, as they did in the past.  Again, I want to be clear that I admire the heroism of our brave soldiers who go there at our government’s orders.  But, as Pete Seeger used to sing, “When will they ever learn?  When will they ever learn?”

When I hear how many of our troops have died, I want to add how many people overall have died.  Many people in Iraq have died too, most of whom were never terrorists.  They are God’s children too.

When people say “Support the troops,” I want to say “Support efforts for peace and an end to war.”

And when people say, “God bless the U.S.A., I want to remind us that “He’s got the whole world in his hands.”  And may God bless us every one.

When I was serving my first church in Oklahoma, a man in the congregation used to ask me when the churches were ever going to speak up against war?  That question still preys on my mind.  At least there was a strong anti-war movement during the Viet Nam conflict.  There isn’t much protest today.

I never thought I would see the day when our government allowed, and even defended, torture!  I think we should act out of who we are, what our principles are, not react against what someone else has done.

Can you imagine Jesus saying “Persecute your enemies, water board those who hate you…”?

We are followers of the Prince of Peace.  He said that those who take the sword will perish by the sword.  He called upon his followers not to be peace hopers, or peace wishers, but peace makers.  Are we answering that call?

Some of you who read this may not agree with me, but I would feel unfaithful to my calling as a minister if I didn’t speak out and say these things.  In my judgment, it is time for followers of Christ to say “No!” to war.

Picture credit goes here.

Peace,

Eric & Matt

Margot at the Wedding is a film written and directed by, go figure, writer/director Noah Baumbach, and this is his follow-up after his Oscar-nominated flick The Squid and the Whale. Like the aforementioned flick “about” a cephalopod and a cetacean, this movie centers around families gone just a wee-bit haywire, marriages on the rocks, affairs, kids caught in the middle, and the forces driving people together and apart.

The film stars Nicole Kidman (equal parts biting, subtle, and heart-breaking) as Margot Zeller, a fiction writer, who takes her son in tow by train, boat, and car to her sister’s pad (Pauline, played by the beguiling Jennifer Jason Leigh) for a weekend. Pauline is set to marry Malcolm (Jack Black), an unemployed artist/writer/rocker, and the Zeller clan is getting together for the first time in a long time for the event. Secrets get shared and hidden, Black pulls off some laugh-out-loud hilarity in the midst of a relatively serious flick, and the tenderness that can be shared between those who love one another gets shot all to hell.

While I didn’t go all “Rah! Rah!” for The Squid and the Whale, I dug this flick because there’s hope hidden beneath the surface callousness of the players. Baumbach creates more believable characters by way of a looser script, which allows the actors to move organically through scenes. In much of his previous work (particularly the Wes Anderson directed flick, The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou), the characters are so affected you feel like you’ve been left out of a story told by old Ivy-League roommates. Here, though, I buy the conflicts, I buy the back-stories, I buy the surprises, I buy the love that nearly gets expressed. (And maybe that’s the up-shot of the flick: love, at best and at worst, can only be nearly expressed).

But you don’t need to buy it. Just rent this sucker.

The first years of my memory are of Niagara Falls. We lived on Orchard Parkway in a tiny second-floor house apartment. And as I grew up in the surrounding area, I learned to think of my hometown as the honeymoon and suicide capital of the world.

I grew up with daredevils risking life, limb, and the lives and limbs of their rescuers, by plummeting in various contraptions over the Horseshoe Falls. I saw news reports of poor fools who fell and drown to their deaths on kayaks and jet-skis as they tried to conquer the cataracts. I watched national television coverage of the lawsuits connected to Love Canal, a neighborhood that was the site of one of the worst toxic-waste-dumping scandals in American history.

My first job, as a bakery assistant, was in Niagara Falls at the headquarters of Di Camillo Bakery, a family business still thriving in this city. And I watched as department stores and jewelry stores and restaurants evaporated from Main Street, turning the road into an assortment of seedy bars, adult novelty stores, and boarded up buildings, each empty as the pockets of the homeless wandering the city. And I watched as the factories closed their doors, and added good, hard-working souls to the unemployment lines….

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Make Progress:

But I also grew up next to a place where people teem to see one the natural wonders of the world. And I grew up in an area where my relatives worked the bluest-collar of jobs, but managed to put lasagna on the table (we’re good Italian-Americans, after all). And I grew up where my grandfather landed after traveling the Atlantic to move to America, the same city where my father was raised and remained, the same city where my sister got married. And I grew up next to one of the marvels of electrical science, the Niagara Power Project.

And so I believe in this place. And I love this place. And it’s time we all helped this treasure of not just New York, but of America, and not just of America, but of the world. We’re ready, if you are, to make progress in Niagara Falls.

• Buy
• Sign
• Give
• E-mail
• Eat

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Editor’s Note: Below you’ll find photos of some of our favorite locations in the city of Niagara Falls.

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The Little Italy neighborhood and business district.

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The genius that is the Niagara Power Project. To learn more about it, click here.

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Di Camillo Bakery, where they make the best Italian bread you’ll ever eat.

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The Niagara River in autumn (if it wasn’t obvious from, you know, the leaves).

Gray wolves in the Northern Rockies will be removed from the endangered species list, following a 13-year restoration effort that helped the animal’s population soar, federal officials said Thursday.

An estimated 1,500 wolves now roam Idaho, Montana and Wyoming. That represents a dramatic turnaround for a predator that was largely exterminated in the United States in the early 20th century.

Great, right? The Endangered Species Program works. That’s great, right? Right? Ummm:

The loss of federal protection allows the three states to move forward with plans allowing hunters to target the animals, possibly as soon as this fall.

Damn it. And we were this close to good news.

Thankfully, an organization called Earth Justice is suing the feds to keep the wolves protected. Here’s their take:

Gray wolves have come perilously close to extinction in the Rocky Mountains. Only in the past decade has the wolf population rebounded from a population of less than 50 to more than 1,300 wolves today. Visitors come to Yellowstone every year to get the chance to see and hear wolves in the wild.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has issued two rules that would not only reverse these hard-won gains, by killing hundreds of these magnificent predators. One rule would remove gray wolves in the Northern Rocky Mountains from protection under the Endangered Species Act. The other rule would allow states in the Northern Rockies to kill wolves whenever wolves had impacts on wild ungulate populations.

The governors of Idaho and Wyoming express outright hostility toward wolves, and numerous counties in Montana, Idaho and Wyoming have adopted resolutions declaring wolves an “unacceptable species.” Once wolves are delisted, Wyoming, Idaho, and Montana could reduce wolf populations to a paltry 100 wolves per state — in other words, they could destroy 1,000 wolves out of the current 1,300-wolf population.

We’ve said it before, I’ll say it again: this, this right here, is yet another example of why the government can’t be trusted to behave, and why it must be watched closely as the toddler it is by its citizens.

We’ll post more about this particular issue as it develops.

Photo c/o this dude.

Frank is a returning vet when we first meet him, and as the film unfolds, I couldn’t help but think: he’s doing “this” because of what he saw and what he did during the war. Any sense of innocence and deep feelings of love were sucked away for him “over there.” For Frank, life is meaningless, a series of empty events — he tries desperately to believe otherwise, but can’t shake away his nihilism. Joe, on the other hand, abhors the violence of his job (he’s a cop), and centers his life on his love of family, and his contentment from routine (morning coffee, newspaper, dinner with his clan). They serve as his escape from the job, from the farm he once ran and still pines for.

Penn shoots the film with a kind of grainy quality – making this a period piece of a sort, and a reminder that life isn’t clean and crisp. And he creates in Frank, a messenger that some experience can make it difficult to want to experience more. In Joe, he offers up, in some ways, the opposite: some can take the mundane and live off that (like the central character in Hemingway’s short story “The Big Two-Hearted River,” a story also about a returning veteran). Additionally, Joe knows what love is: it takes him on trips crossing multiple states; it makes him touch the blood of a loved-one lost; it makes him teach others through a kind of surprising toughness.

In the end we’re not left with two choices, for this isn’t a morality tale. Instead, we’re left with one choice: the one we decide on our own.

A wee bit of a warning: this film contains some bloody violence and not-so-pleasant full-frontal nudity, but it’s worth the ending’s gut-wrenching payoff.

I’m not going write this Wednesday without making a confession: there have been two times in my life when I regularly smoked cigarettes (between 1/2 a pack and 1 1/2 packs a day). Each time was brief (don’t worry, Mom), and both times I quit, quickly and cold, though not without struggles.

My buddy Pete, a former 15-year smoker, put it to me this way: “After a couple of days the nicotine is out of your body, then it’s just whether or not you’re a pansy.”

Even though it was mainly easy (but not-so breezy) for me to put out my last butt, I can see how people get hooked and hold onto the habit: it ain’t just chemical. It gets hard-wired in our brains in association with food, work, sex, travel, socializing, and escape. And those are six pretty damned good things.

But (you knew there was one coming, right?) none of those are a good enough reason to start or continue. Is there a good one? Of course not. Every smoker and non-smoker knows this. Should you be allowed to smoke? Probably Maybe. But should you? No $%&@*!^ way.

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Make Progress:

There are three ways to make progress this week: stop smoking; help someone else stop smoking (just email the post to your pals); educate yourself on smoking for your own sake and the sake of others.

• Quit
• Watch
• Look
• Protect

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Quit:

In case you or yours actually need to know why quitting would be a good idea, here goes:

1. According to the American Cancer Society, “smoking is responsible for nearly 1 in 5 deaths in the United States.”
2. And it ain’t just lung, larynx, and mouth cancer staring us down, my people. Smoking is directly linked to cancers of the pancreas, cervix, kidney, stomach, pharynx, esophagus, and bladder.
3. Of course, cigarettes don’t only bring about cancer. Smoking is a major or contributing cause of (in alphabetical order): aneurysms, asthma, bronchitis, emphysema, heart disease, pneumonia, and stroke.
4. There’s more: smoking increases your odds of bone thinning, hip fractures, peptic ulcers, and (get this) cataracts.
5. In the year 2000, 8.6 million Americans were suffering from “at least one chronic disease due to current or former smoking.” Says who? Says the Centers for Disease Control. Just for comparison’s sake, let me just mention that there are 8.1 million people living in New York City.
6. How many known carcinogens are in cigarette smoke? 43.
7. And as if we needed to know another reason why the tobacco behemoths dump nicotine in cigs, there’s this: “nicotine, when inhaled in cigarette smoke, reaches the brain faster than drugs that enter the body intravenously.” We’re all about sticking it to these companies whose goal it is, quite literally, to addict us and destroy us.
8. And on top of all that, cigarettes are freaking expensive.
9. Oh, and they make your breath stink like a burning tire.

But quitting, as I know, is easier typed than done. And why is it so damned difficult? Because, according to the U.S. Surgeon General, “the pharmacologic and behavioral processes that determine tobacco addiction are similar to those that determine addiction to drugs such as heroin and cocaine.” You read that right: cigarettes are like heroin and cocaine.

Look, I’ve quit myself, and I’ve fired up again. I’ve watched my friends struggle through this addiction. There ain’t nothing wrong with asking for some help, so here’s some from:

• The University of Texas
• The American Cancer Society
• The Centers for Disease Control
• SmokeFree.gov
• The Surgeon General

Or just call this number: 1-800-QUIT-NOW.

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Watch:

Need more umph for you or a pal? Give these pair of thetruth.com videos a whirl.

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Look:

Look, friends, we were going to post three or four or five pictures here of diseased lungs, gangrenous legs, cases of mouth cancer, and laryngectomies, but… well, two things:

1. These photos are so peel-your-eyelids-back gruesome, we didn’t think it would be appropriate for a place we consider to be rather PG, maybe PG-13.
2. These photos made us want to power-puke.

So, our advice to you is this: check it out for yourselves if you want to. If you smoke, it’s a must. I’ll wager dollars to donuts (and I really dig donuts) that you’ll seriously consider a self-imposed cease and desist order for cigarettes (or your tobacco product of choice). And if you don’t smoke, well, hell, these photos will do two things: keep you from ever, ever, ever, ever smoking; convince you to get your friends who stink like old ashtrays to kick the habit before they kick ye old can.

And where might you find some of these not-so-fun photos? Here, here, here, here, and here. Please, please, please don’t say we didn’t warn you. We did. In fact, we’ll warn you one more time: this stuff is messed up, kids.

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Protect:

This sucker is threefold, but we’ll focus on the most unusual of the three:

1. Do yourself a favor and steer clear of bars and restaurants that still allow smoking. (There are only 22 states that allow the former and 20 the latter.) Secondhand smoke kills ya. You’ve made it to adulthood and still need proof? Just click here.
2. Try to keep your kids away from secondhand smoke. Wanna know why? Read this, baby.
3. Protect your pets.

If you’re not worried about yourself and you don’t have kids, at least consider your furry and feathered friends, because besides saving your own hide from cancer, emphysema, and breath that smells like a cadaver, here’s another reason to leave Marlboro country:

“There have been a number of scientific papers recently that have reported the significant health threat secondhand smoke poses to pets,” said veterinarian Carolynn MacAllister of Oklahoma State University. “Secondhand smoke has been associated with oral cancer and lymphoma in cats, lung and nasal cancer in dogs, as well as lung cancer in birds.”

Cats living with smokers are also twice as likely to develop malignant lymphoma, a cancer that occurs in the lymph nodes and that is fatal to three out of four cats within 12 months of developing it.

Studies have also shown that dogs living in a smoking household are susceptible to cancers of the nose and sinus area, particularly if they are a long-nosed breed, because their noses have a greater surface area that is exposed to carcinogens and a greater area for them to accumulate. Dogs affected with nasal cancer normally don’t survive for more than one year.

Birds are also at risk for lung cancer, as well as pneumonia, because their respiratory systems are hypersensitive to any type of air pollutant.

While I’ve heard some interesting arguments for banning smoking outright, I still fall on the libertarian side: as long as you’re not harming me (which means no smoking in public places, thank you), you should be allowed to do, for the most part, whatever you please. This study, though, complicates things: where does a person’s right to harm themselves end and the rights of an animal begin? The same goes, even more so, for kids.

So, will I smoke a cigar the next time one of my buddies gets hitched? Despite my better judgment, I probably will. But ask me this: Will you smoke that stogy in front of Weasley, Eric’s Cavalier King Charles Spaniel? No sir, I won’t. Why? Not just because I don’t want to harm the poor thing, but because what in the hell is his puppy doing at a wedding reception? That’s just not right.