In last year’s remake of the 1970s classic science fiction file, “The Stepford Wives,” a group of techno-weirdos set out to transform imperfect women into perfect wives. Of course, the plan fails because of… well, a lot of reasons.
But the point is, the world remains as full of weirdos today seeking to create the perfect person as when Pygmalion tried many centuries ago. Now, the “Stepford Search” has come to corporate America.
Weyco Inc., a Michigan company, has decided to fire any employee who smokes. Not just any employee who smokes on the job. Any employee who smokes anywhere, anytime, anyhow. Why? To help the employees make healthful life choices and become better persons; to help the employees “manage their health care.”
How does the company ensure its employees remain truly and permanently “smoke free?” Mandatory “drug” tests. If traces of the “devil weed” tobacco are found, the hapless employee who thought he or she lived in a free country — one in which a citizen could practice such horrible habits as lighting up a cigarette or cigar in the “privacy” of his or her home — is summarily fired.
In the 1950s and 1960s, the decades of my misspent youth, we harbored the illusion such menaces as nuclear war or communist invasion were the real enemies of freedom.
How wrong we were. The good folks running America just four or five decades later, including the Weyco Gestapo, know the real enemy of man is not the trivial nuclear holocaust, but smoking. And they will leave no freedom unturned in their zeal to root it out wherever it might still lurk.
Of course, the absurd lengths to which Weyco Inc. is going to attack a problem that clearly is none of its business, is exceeded only by the fact this “corporation” is allowed — at least thus far — to carry out its crusa
Originally written By: Bob Barr
