Special to the Daily Times
October 10, 2008 10:59 am
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Dear Editor:
After reading your commentaries on the smoking issue – first, even as a former smoker, let me say up front: I prefer not to sit close to someone who is smoking. However, I question just how far the arm of control by the City Council can reach. The last I knew, smoking was not against the “law of the land.”
Yes, the city council can ban smoking in public building/places under their jurisdiction; however, dictating policy for the individual business owner or citizens is against everything for which our forefathers stood. Remember – the word called “freedom!”
Therefore, I believe the smoking/non-smoking decision as it pertains to the business sector should be left to the individual business owner. If the business owner prefers to be a non-smoking enterprise, then the smoker is “free” to take his or her business where smoking is allowed.
In reverse, if the owner of a business prefers to allow smoking – then the non-smoker is “free” to take his or her money elsewhere. Result: everyone is happy. Freedom still rings!
This paragraph certainly will not win me many friends; but I find it more irritating to be exposed to misbehaving children in a restaurant (or elsewhere) than by a smoker. However, I am not suggesting that we pass a law against unruly children or against parents who are oblivious to their children’s bad behavior – which, when occurring in a restaurant, can cause indigestion that can also be hazardous to one’s health!
In closing, I hope the council will refrain from stepping into the arena of dictating to private businesses their right as it pertains to the “smoking/non-smoking” issue. And as Forrest Gump said, “That is all I am going to say about this.”
Sarah Smila
Glasgow
Patrons’ rude behavior detracted from concert
Dear Editor:
We attended the Billy Currington concert last Friday night and were really really terribly disappointed.
Oh, no – not in Mr. Currington or his music. We were shocked and disappointed in the rude, disrespectful, inconsiderate, awful way that people were acting by standing up during the entire concert and preventing the people sitting behind them from seeing the show.
Some were asked by the people behind them to please sit down, but to no avail.
And to make it worse, no one from the Plaza even made an effort to ask them to sit down.
If there were a movie playing and people were standing up and preventing others from seeing the it, they would have been asked to sit down.
There’s no difference.
We all had tickets. We all had seats. But a lot of folks got short-changed because the rude ones got to see and others didn’t.
Sandy Jolly
Glasgow
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