During a stressful production day at the paper, Editor in Chief Colleen J Miller thought a cigarette might be the cure. Managing Editor

Katie Wolf went outside for the fresh air and was left unhappy with her surroundings.

By CURTISS GULASH

Guest Columnist

Raise your hand, or better yet, your cigarette, if you’re a smoker.   

Now, to all of the smokers out there, when you raised that cigarette up, did smoke drift into the face of any nearby non-smokers? Burning their eyes and making their noses scrunch up? But not like a cute little bunny — more like a vampire bat ready to lunge for your throat?  And did you apologize? It doesn’t matter if you were both in the Smoker’s Cave outside South Foundation Hall. And it doesn’t matter if they happened to be walking past you as you were exhaling, because no matter what the circumstances were, you’re to blame.  And there’s a chance that they didn’t appreciate your smoke going into their faces. Maybe the hacking cough is an indication.

Filthy litterbugs

Another thing the non-smokers don’t appreciate is seeing your cigarette butts on the ground. The nasty brown and yellow remnants of your habit dotting the paths they walk on. But maybe you were just leaving a trail of cigarette butts so you’d be able to find your way back to where you came from, like a cancerous Hansel and Gretel.

Recently I was walking to the Oakland Center with a friend, a smoker, and after taking a final drag on her cigarette, she threw it down onto the sidewalk. She slowed up just for a second to snuff the still-smoking butt out with the toe of her shoe, and then quickened her pace to catch up with me. I asked her why she didn’t pick up the butt, her butt, to throw it in the ashtray outside the doors of the OC, and her response was simply, “Cigarette butts are gross!” Apparently, not gross enough to keep her from putting them in her mouth and then littering the ground with them, but gross enough to not want to touch them once she’s done smoking.

What am I getting at, you ask?

What I’m getting at is this: Smokers, you’re a bunch of rude jerks! (And if a vampire bat did decide to chomp down on your throat, you probably deserved it.)

Now, let me make something clear, this is not an anti-smoking rant. This is not a “cigarettes are icky and are responsible for black lungs and for X-amount of deaths and illnesses and secondhand smoke pollutes the air around us and makes our clothes smell, etc.” diatribe. You get the picture. You see, I’m a smoker. Mea culpa, I’m guilty. And on behalf of my fellow smokers, the ones who exhaled smoke in your face, the ones who are puffing away as you walk past them on your way to class, who throw cigarette butts on the ground, and whose smoke drifts into your nostrils as you take that first saliva-filled bite into your Jimmy John’s: We’re sorry.

Our apologies

We are sorry that as we were walking across campus, we exhaled smoke that drifted into your face as you were walking behind us, sitting on a bench, or riding by on your bike.

We are sorry that we were huddled around the door puffing away, creating a noxious cloud that you had to walk through to get into the building.

We are sorry that we continually throw cigarette butts on the ground, sometimes within inches of a trash can or ashtray.

We are sorry that while sitting at the table next to you, we chain-smoked while cramming for an exam, and didn’t hear you coughing and sneezing as you worked on your trig homework.

We are sorry that when it was raining, windy, snowing or below zero degrees we lit a cigarette just inside the door of a building, before stepping outside to power-drag it down to the filter, so we could quickly get back inside and out of the nasty weather.

A new promise

We, the undersigned, do solemnly swear to:

­­­• Look around before we exhale. (This includes when we’re smoking, as we’re running to class, to take an exam that began five minutes ago.)

• Take a few steps back before lighting a cigarette whenever talking to a potential non-smoker. (Despite the fact that the cigarette and lighter in our hand made it more than apparent that we were going to be smoking. And even though they could just as easily move.)

• Walk the extra three feet to a trash can or ashtray and deposit our cigarette butt there, when we could just as easily throw it on the ground, and we might even pick up some of the cigarette butts scattered on the pavement. (Just because part of our tuition goes toward groundskeeping and trash removal doesn’t give us the right to litter.)

• Urge our fellow smokers to take into consideration the smoke clouds and cigarette butts that linger around them when they’re smoking, and try and get them to think before they smoke. (My favorite analogy involves “The Bros” who fog themselves in Axe Body Spray before getting out of their car before class. And how they, like all of us smokers, don’t notice the chemical cloud that follows them.)

• All in all, be more courteous and responsible for our habit and for the breathing room of non-smokers because we know that as of July 1, 2009, there are over 305 100 percent smoke-free college campuses in the U.S., including seven in Michigan, and OU could easily become one of them, causing us to have to leave  campus to smoke.

Again, we’re sorry. (And we might even try to quit.)

Sincerely,

The Smokers