n When I first read yesterday’s column, (“The Smoker’s Lament,” Feb. 28, p. 8) I was infuriated. After several hours of fuming, I started to question whether the piece was written sincerely, or was just another example of the poorly written satire that seems so prevalent these days.

The article is so full of contradictions and stupidity that I couldn’t fathom the idea that Adan Berkowitz actually believed the words he wrote. Every single point he makes is full of holes and easily undermined, and is written with such an arrogant and cavalier attitude about death that it’s almost unspeakable.

The first piece of absurdity appears with the paragraph that states, “Kids aren’t stupid.” He goes on to explain that kids start smoking not because of cigarette ads, but to “stick it to their parents” or because they want to “stick it” to the people in the “Truth” commercials.

How, exactly, is that not stupid? How is starting a habit that you know is deadly, simply to rebel against your parents, not idiotic?

He goes on to assert that the “obscene tax” on cigarettes helps “pay for our schools and roads and all that good stuff,” as if people who are against smoking are to blame because they are taking away money from our precious school children. That’s like promoting smoking because it’s good population control. The argument is so ridiculous it’s almost not worth refuting.

The most offensive piece of the article comes at the end, in which he proudly proclaims that he knows smoking will kill him, and that he’s “okay with that [and has] made peace with it.” How can any healthy twenty-year-old claim he is at peace with death? Unless you are terminally ill or have escaped a brush with death, you can never truly understand your own mortality, and for Berkowitz to claim that he has is the height of insult. It also implies that his death would affect no one but himself.

I can not believe the arrogance of someone that would put “the comfort of a cigarette,” the “ritual” of it, over the love of their family and friends. He says that cigarettes “help keep [him] sane.” Where will his sanity be when Berkowitz misses his child’s graduation because he is dying of emphysema?

Finally, I can not imagine any word more hateful and inappropriate than “sappy” when used to describe an experience like my mother’s, who watched her mother die a horrible, wasting death from smoking at the age of 59, when she herself was only 27.

I defy Berkowitz to watch his mother die slowly and painfully in the next five years of his life and then label it as a “sappy anecdote.” If he truly hopes that when he dies he does not regret “even a single” moment of smoking, then I do not pity him, but feel sorry for his family and friends who are forced to watch him die because Berkowitz was too selfish to think of them.

Carolyn Sinnett

CAS ’07