by Colin Hyde
My sense is there are girls who feel harassed when they are whistled at. And there are girls who like to be whistled at, especially by guys to whom they are partial. We know that girls feel a little disrespected if they are completely ignored by guys they are secretly partial to. How does a guy know if a girl or young lady is partial to them? We can talk about the type of hello and that kind of thing. The story here is that this turf is not black and white.
So, the story from Corozal Town is that a girl – really, a young lady (I heard she was 18)—felt terror when a guy in a vehicle said things to her to “seduce” her to ride with him. Other girls came forward and said that the same guy had thrown his line at them at other times, and they too felt a little nervous, or maybe plenty nervous by his approach. The complaints are a lesson to guys who like to whistle, that their advances can be really traumatic to girls and young ladies. I make the assumption that the fresh whistler was no school-age fellow or recent graduate. I think the older the whistler, the more girls/young ladies are likely to get scared, and it is so that their trepidation could reach as far as terror.
The people at the Police Department thought, rightly, that they ought to investigate this whistler, and they did. They found him quickly, because the vehicle he was in when he whistled at girls belongs to a prominent local company. Puchica. The police then proceeded to hold the guy in a cell for TWO days! I say, that’s how we make an EXAMPLE of people in modern Belize.
I don’t know if the guy is a known predator. I don’t know that the guy is wanted by police for a number of crimes, and he has been eluding them with the help of one of our, ehm, unscrupulous lawyers. We weren’t told anything about this guy, other than that the police felt they needed to ask him some questions about his whistling. And it’s for that reason that he was in custody for two days.
I think we are bloody barbaric. Yes, the police, rightly, had to ask some questions. But the guy wasn’t suspected of committing a violent crime. Whistling is not a crime; if it was it would have to be in the category called minor misdemeanor; and it’s kind of hard to see how that could carry the kind of penalty that would make a whistler a flight risk. It was bad enough punishment for the fellow that his job was in jeopardy after he had used his boss’s vehicle to try and pick up girls.
I heard Minister Kareem has said we need to see if we can draw some lines about this whistling. We are aware that whistling can be very unwholesome, so like most Belizeans I will be listening to such discussion to see what ideas will be tossed around. But I don’t think we can make it a criminal act; and if we did, it couldn’t warrant confinement for two days for a first offense. Don’t make the penalty worse than the infraction, Braa. You just took two days out of the life God gave to a brother. That is unconscionable.
Public education really did a number on tobacco
The fact that some people smoke cigarettes and cigars, and chew tobacco, must mean that they derive some pleasure from those activities, maybe a lot, because nobody is behind anyone with a whip forcing them to suck smoke and swallow nicotine. It could be argued that there was a time when people who didn’t really derive much pleasure from nicotine, smoked it and whatever else you do to get it in your system, because they had been tricked into it by slick advertising. Don’t get arrogant. Everyone is susceptible to being tricked, and it is more likely if the bait is packaged with a brother being smiled at by a sexy lady.
This nicotine, it was and still is big business. We don’t invest much money in research, so to get the sense of what the tobacco business is like we have to go to the reliable countries, like the US, which is a prominent one in that category. The paper, “Tobacco and the Economy: Farms, Jobs, and Communities” states that in 1998 consumers in the US “spent an estimated $59.3 billion on tobacco products, chiefly on cigarettes ($55.7 billion).” The paper also mentioned that “these consumer expenditures support thousands of businesses that manufacture, transport, market, and sell these products, as well as some 90,000 farms that grow tobacco leaf.”
Tobacco would have been bigger business in 1998, if it hadn’t been discovered some years previously that it isn’t a healthy habit. A connection was made between nicotine and some of the worst diseases. In their response, the authorities were more civil than they had and have been in their efforts to reduce alcohol drinking and weed-smoking. They countered the slick advertising by forcing all nicotine products to carry a warning on the label about the product’s horrors. The enemies of tobacco also made a connection between second-hand smoke and serious diseases, and after that it became the fashion to cramp smokers in out-of-the-way areas.
On Friday last, Belize joined the rest of the world in observing “World No Tobacco Day”, which a story in the Amandala said the WHO had declared to “make the public aware of the dangers that using tobacco poses to healthy living, and to protect future generations from its negative effects.” The story in the Amandala said the Director of Public Health, Dr. Melissa Diaz, said tobacco use “causes millions of deaths worldwide”, that the drug is linked to cancer and heart disease, and that heart disease is one of the leading causes of morbidity and death in our country. The story went on to say that within our region 7.8% of 13 to 15-year-olds use tobacco, and that in Belize “about 13% of persons use tobacco products.”
Like the rest of the world, I 100% support feeding young people all the ugly information about tobacco. Whoa, I can’t believe that with all that damning evidence out there, 13% of us still use it. I think that there we are stretching the truth, albeit for a good cause. I think what I see around me counts for something, and based on that we’d be on page if the report said 13% of us “have” used tobacco, and if in the report “used” means smoking or chewing it for a year or less.
A number of people in my circle quit smoking years ago, just walked away from the vice. But maybe there really are a lot of “chimneys” out there, and the reason why we don’t see them is because of the limited areas where they have a license to light up.
Several people near and dear to me who never quit chain smoking have passed on. An uncle died in his 80s, from diabetes. But he did have breathing problems in his last years. A god-uncle died in his 90s from a cancer behind an ear. A close friend died a few years shy of his three score and ten, from diabetes. A brother to whom I owed a super special favor died when he was around 60, and his family believes his death was related to smoking.
Education has put a very big dent in tobacco use. With all the condemnation out there, people who are into nicotine must really, really enjoy it, or they must derive something else from it that makes their lives better. Smoking cigarettes never did much for me, but I’m rather kindly to the smell of second-hand cigarette smoke. I have my own to-die-for. I get high as a kite on smoke from buttonwood, kerosene stoves, and old Bedford trucks that are racked with incomplete combustion.