Fire Sale, Up in Smoke

­­­Set this house on fire
Imagine.

You own a home, the prize of your life in which you have invested so much time, money and energy.

Along comes a buyer. You hesitate because you never put your house on the market for sale.

But the buyer offers a mighty good deal. You deliberate, thoughts of lounging on an island in the Caribbean hanging out with Johnny Depp or Keith Richards, both of whom own islands, alluring you.

You have an epiphany. Maybe you can get a better deal, so you invite other buyers to offer you a price.

You are inundated with advice. Your lawyers and accountant accost you, tell you to sell. Your bank gets pushy. Of course, they see their pockets being lined from a sale.

Meanwhile, your banker, accountant, attorney, ex-wife, ex-girlfriend, ex-boyfriend, ex-partner and children, pissed off because you promised to move to the country when they were little grandees and never did, tell everyone there are rats in your attic, termites in the foundation and raccoon nests in the chimney.

Suddenly, the buyers state the terms of the sale. They demand you lower your price or throw in your first born (actually, you think that’s not a bad idea) and buckle to their bodacious demands.

This is how the privatization of the port is playing out.

Up in Smoke 
Publisher's note: Mr. Donny Damon appeared before Virginia legislators earlier this week with a jug of cigarette butts demanding lawmakers ban smoking on public beaches. 


 Impressive, Mr. Damon.

You spent three months collecting cigarette butts. Then you stuffed them into a plastic bottle to demonstrate to legislators the need to ban smoking on public beaches. 


Are you sure you picked up that many butts? I call for a re-call and an independent advisory panel to certify that those butts were collected from where you said they were collected.

But Mr. Damon you really made a mistake when you lugged those little babies to the legislature in a plastic bottle.

Plastic. Made from a petroleum based polymer, known as PET.

It takes over 700 years for plastic to decompose. And someone is upset that cigarette filters don’t decompose for ten years.

Landfills are choked with plastic bags and bottles.

In the spirit of compromise, let’s ban plastic “anything” as well.

This is a slippery slope. If you ban smoking on a public beach, it might lead to a ban on showing tattoos or anything that anyone finds offensive. You may not be able to read Fifty Shades of Gray in public, for example.

But the crucial word here is “public.” These are public beaches built and sustained by public money. Tax dollars.

Outdoor smoking bans have an edge of hypocrisy to them.

While the public is free of cigarette smoke, they are still ingesting particles of pollution in the air – from heavy industry, from car exhausts, from utility plants.

Enforce the litter laws. If you ban smoking, people will still litter.

Simple solution.

To the intellect, Mr. Damon’s line of reasoning is absurd, but not, perhaps, to Mr. Damon’s imagination.