How can people still smoke knowing what we know today?

I am a redneck and I am not at all ashamed of that. To people on the outside we are a bunch of idiots but I don't think that this stereotype is very fair. We also don't really care all that much what people think of us so if someone out there is the type of person that thinks that about anyone they see wearing a Budweiser T-shirt in a pickup truck, you can go ahead and go for it.

I will say this about the redneck community as a whole though and that is that the obvious and very well-known dangers of continuing to smoke cigarettes hasn't really had much of an impact on usage in our group. Most of the country boys that I know still smoke despite the fact that ciggies have more than quadrupled in prices since I was in my 20's and all of the negative effects of smoking are not just something we see on a pack of smokes, but is likely something that we have seen have terrible detrimental effects on people we know and love.

In my own family I have had an uncle and a grandfather who passed away from things related to smoking. With my grandfather he was really old and had a wide array of issues but with my uncle it was undeniable that basically the only thing that lead to his untimely death before he even hit 70 was because of the more than 50 years of smoking cigarettes that he had participated in his entire life.

He was a redneck just like me. He was an outdoorsman, he was a dedicated family man, he enjoyed cheap American beer, and he was nice to almost everyone that he met provided they were not liberals. In his youth I think we could all say that smoking was not even considered a vice, the world was very naïve about the dangers of smoking before the 70's and even when I was in school in the 80's and 90's we were in a state of denial about how harmful this habit actually is.

I can point out to my friends who smoke (which is most of them) the statistics about how if you are a smoker you are at a 50% extra risk of a wide array of health problems in the future but this has no effect on them. It doesn't make much sense to me because if you were to present a 50/50 statistic about something awful happening to them regarding almost anything else they would probably change their mind about it. Something like "HEMI's explode after 10 years and turn the car into a blazing inferno 50% of the time." If we had rather conclusive proof of this we would see the sale of HEMI's drop dramatically in the redneck community.

But for reasons I simply cannot understand the redneck community has what I have to presume is a much higher than average percentage of the population that are smokers. This is so much so that a big part of the reason why the Elks Lodge is so popular among good ol boys is because since they are a private club, they can allow smoking indoors even though it is against the law in all public areas.

I smoked when I was in high school and a little bit of the time that I was in college. It was almost required of you if you were in the redneck community. I don't generally get involved with the younger members of the redneck community unless they are employed on one of my job sites, but I have seen them smoking out in the open without even a little bit of fear of being reprimanded. I think a lot of this has to do with the fact that there is a very good chance that their parents also smoke and getting in trouble for doing what daddy already does would be kind of hypocritical now wouldn't it?

I don't know what it is going to take in order to change this and honestly, I don't think that anything will. We already have insane taxes on tobacco and gruesome pictures of lungs and cists on he boxes but this doesn't seem to have any effect. It just makes them poorer since a pack of cigs is $5 with likely more than 4 of that going to the government.

I like most aspects of the redneck community. I prefer it actually to modern city life, but this is one aspect of the community that they are dead wrong about and I wonder how many of them are going to have to have very serious health issues - probably in the next 20 years or so - before they wise up and stop.