Making a Comeback

[Smartboy]

On various occasions, I have written about the impact that the second-season episode "Julie Smokes" had on me. It seemed to me that throughout the seventies and eighties, almost every show had at least one episode that preached the gospel about how terrible it was to smoke. There were even some cartoons with this message. One top of this, there were all sorts of Public Service Announcements about this topic. It seemed at the time that the common school of thought was that anyone who hates smokers cannot be all bad! Well, it seemed as if, from the nineties onward, this issue started to take a backseat to other issues of the day. Shows tended to preach the gospel about other types of things. And then we have shows like "Seinfeld" that never preached any gospel about anything. Well, it seems as if in the last couple of years the anti-smoking campaign has made somewhat of a comeback. A lot of the time in which I watch TV in the early evening, I see commercials about the horrors of smoking. It happened that yesterday, I had some time in the afternoon and was deciding what to watch. While flipping through the channels, I came upon an ad in which the spokesperson was a woman who had to get her toes cut off because of the effects of her smoking. Well, shortly before I came here, I posted a thread on the "Friends" page that also had to do with the smoking issue. I would be very interested in what any of you guys think of it.