The Colby Echo

Issue date: 3/9/07 Section: Opinions

Media Credit: Margie Gribbell

I've never smoked a cigarette. I've never been tanning. I've never seen much point in either activity, in spite of the whole cancer thing. Smoking doesn't work well with running; my slightly olive-ish complexion prevents me from feeling too ghostly during Maine winters. Also, I'm cheap and cigarettes and tanning sessions cost money that I'd rather spend on music or Snyder's of Hanover's delectable Honey-Mustard and Onion nibblers.

Smoking cigarettes and frequenting tanning salons are a personal choice, then. Yet society is completely up in arms about them-parents, schools, the TV all yell at us not to smoke cigarettes, not to go tanning. They are both legal (to an extent), but both are huge taboos. Barack Obama tries to hide his cigarette habit. Lindsay Lohan tries to hide her tanning habit. People are embarrassed about paying for things that could kill them.

This all makes sense, of course. We shouldn't value doing things that are harmful to our bodies.

Last weekend, I visited a local tanning salon. I sat in the lobby for awhile, without actually tanning or showing any intent to do so (which is an awkward experience, if you've never tried it, but I did catch up on some important reading in old issues of Cosmo). I looked, I listened. Some people came in to tan; others left, skin hues slightly darker. Some of the people who I saw didn't surprise me in a tanning salon; others really, really did. There is no tanning "type"; similarly, as I've garnered simply from walking around campus, there is no smoking type.

A very significant percentage (at the least) of my friends smoke or tan from time to time. These are all athletic, profound, intelligent, attractive, (kind of, maybe) wholesome, good people. They're typical Colby students. Still, their habits are frowned upon. In fact, I would venture so far as to say that more Colby students would endorse smoking marijuana than cigarettes.

I once smoked a peach-flavored cigar purchased at a Wawa convenience store on the Jersey shore. I spend my summers on a beach in southern California and sometimes I'm less than diligent with reapplications of sunscreen. Yet, my actions in these instances are hardly cultural taboo.

Is smoking the rare drunken cigarette any worse for your lungs than living in a polluted city or never cleaning your room? Is tanning more in the wrong than eating genetically-modified cheese deep-fried in oil and covered in bread-crumbs and chocolate sprinkles? If you had to choose between occasionally smoking or tanning and never breaking a sweat, which would be more detrimental to your health?

Yet few express the same vehement opinions about particulate matter, or high-fat diets, or the gym as many do about tanning and cigarettes. For or against, we all seem to have strongly-held convictions.

How do we, at Colby, form these convictions? Why do we choose to oppose smoking, and then secretly relish it? Why do we look down upon tanning and then binge-drink every weekend? While I'm highly simplifying this situation, drawing black and white lines where it's probably more gray-toned, I can't help but wonder what has caused us to develop certain biases against one way of hurting ourselves, while letting others slide past as the norm.

Did the public-service announcements from Saturday cartoons prevent me from ever lighting up? Did the magazine articles I read as a 'tween keep me away from the tanning salon? Did I follow the example of my parents, both non-smokers, in choosing to be the same way? Was I influenced by Officer Belford, my fifth-grade drug prevention teacher? Was I worried I'd end up looking like a fine piece of leather like the girls in my high-school who frequented tanning salons twice a day?

Whatever it was that caused me to never smoke or tan, I still find myself feeling much less ambiguous, less vague, less confused about these activities than so many other "bad" things.

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