It's Time for Vapers to Declare War

Vapeline: 2/28/2015 7:30 CST

 I for one am sick and tired of playing nice with politicians who are trying to set the clock back to the days when we didn’t have any alternative to smoking. With their attempts to ban flavors and tax e-cigs and over-regulate the industry so that only Big Tobacco will be able to pay to play in it, they are essentially making a concerted effort to condemn millions of people to slow death by lung cancer and other diseases caused by smoking. Ignorance is no excuse. It is their job as elected officials to educate themselves regarding the issues they vote on.

These politicians are not people we need to play nice with. On the contrary. These are people we need to rebel against with everything we have. Playing nice with them only turns us into the lambs for their slaughter. It’s time to bring some civil disobedience into this fight. It’s time we showed them that even if they do manage to pass their backward laws that will ultimately condemn us to death—we have no intentions to obey them.

So many people are under the delusion that if we act civil, somehow, like magic, that’s going to stop these greedy politicians and corrupt lobbyists from taking away our only hope to escape the disease that the cigarette industry has brought upon the world. They don’t care one iota about how civil we are. Money talks, not politeness. In fact, the more civil we are, the easier it makes it for them to do whatever they want to do to us. Being friendly to them is like being friendly to the Nazis as they make their plans to build their concentration camps to kill us in. Let there be no mistake: what they propose with each attempt at banning e-cigs is nothing short of an attempt at mass murder.

It’s time to act out and show them how enraged we are. It’s time we violated their personal space and reminded them of the horrors cigarette smoke has created over the last century. It’s time we got up in their faces and showed them that there will be no business as usual as long as they are proposing bills and passing laws that are detrimental to our health. It’s time we interrupted their system. They deserve to be accosted in the streets, not pandered to. If they think they have the right to butt their noses into our lives, then let’s show them what it feels like to have their privacy violated. They need to be interrupted and publically ridiculed and shamed for what they are doing. They need to know what it feels like to be threatened, since every one of their actions is threatening us. They don’t need diplomatic phone calls begging them not to destroy us. They need to be spammed with hate mail and harassed at every opportunity; they need to be called out for what they are—stupid greedy bastards who care more about collecting taxes than they do about the welfare of those who voted for them.

We have seen in places like Indiana what happens when we politely participate in their system to voice our concerns. We get ignored and they vote any way they want to vote anyway. More impact would have been made if a gang of dying cigarette smokers stormed the hall in protest and splashed the politicians with a symbolic bucket of blood. At least that would have made the news. Instead, by playing nice, the voices of the vapers were washed away as if they never even spoke in the first place. Politicians who are trying to condemn society with the plague of cancer do not deserve to feel safe. They need to understand that their actions will have consequences. They need to know in no uncertain terms that if they threaten us by taking away our tried and true means of smoking cessation, they will also feel threatened.

Being Mr. Nice Guy has gotten the vaping community absolutely nowhere. It’s time to come up with a more effective strategy. It’s time to declare war.