Again, I posted the song in response to a request for anti-smoking songs, and I'm not really concerned about people who don't get it or don't enjoy it. The world is wide. I'm sure you'll all find something you do enjoy, and we can all raise a glass to that. I'm thankful a few of you realize how silly people look denouncing a song without hearing it. You're welcome to hear it, but at present you'd have to come to California's Labor Heritage Festival to hear it, since I wrote it right after the Christmas Eve street fair, I haven't had a chance to record it yet, and it's not really my top priority. But calling a song titled "Smokers Are Scum, a gentle song..." is an accurate use of irony.

The scum referred to in the song are smokers who smoke in street fairs around other people, in this case a street fair where smoking was supposedly prohibited. The subject of both the song and the thread is secondhand smoke exposure and related policy. I have no apology to make for calling people who would smoke and expose others at a children's holiday fair scum. Children, as I hope you all know, are particularly at risk, as am I.

I would never have taken the gig if I had known it would involve hours of dedicated tobacco exposure. Again, I've survived cancer twice, and since my lungs shut down from the chemotherapy (not the lymphoma) last time, I no longer have the treatment options the rest of you may have if you are diagnosed with cancer. I did try to tell this to the most adamant smokers, who clarified quite consistently that they did not care. Scum, my friends.

All, and I do mean all of the other people with my disease at the hospital where I was treated are dead. I have no embarrassment at all speaking up from an admittedly relatively unique perspective, that of a cancer survivor having someone hold a cigarette over my fiddle while I played, and I hope other cancer survivors, however few we are, will speak up as well when smokers pretend to be oblivious to the impact they have on the health of the people around them.

I spent a month hooked up to machines, which everyone thought would be the end of me, and then after beating the machine odds I spent a solid year being able to walk or talk, but not both, and still having to work, function, etc. I never thought I would be able to play and sing at the same time again, so now that I can it only fires me up when people try to bully me out of speaking my mind. Secondhand smoke, as I've mentioned before, is 6-12 times more toxic than what the smoker is inhaling. The surgeon general puts it simply - "there is no safe dose."

Most people who have their own homes and of course only their own health to impact have never thought much about the difficulties that arise in public or shared housing when a smoker's and a non-smoker's units share common halls, common walls through which air is traded through electrical outlets, heating ducts, poorly insulated windows and walls, etc. If there's a playground there, for instance, parents aware of the risks to their children would have to keep their children away if there area is frequented by smokers. There are now powerful studies available on the very real health risks to children in these settings.

I'm delighted to hear those of you who smoke speak with pride about moving away from other people to take a puff on a jetty, and share your bewilderment at people who would go out of their way to give you a bucket of unpleasantness for doing something so thoughtful. You ought to get a medal, as I've said before.

But there has been very little patience and kindness in this thread. Not really a complaint on my part, just an observation. I am going to do my best to continue to converse with people about second and thirdhand smoke exposure and the changing policies worldwide. If you think you're scum there's not a lot I can do about it. I've made my own point as clearly as I can. I have a song I can sing directly to the next smoker who decides to dose my fiddle with tobacco and nicotine, and I'm practicing watering my plants with the most comic array of squirt guns shaped like dolphins and flamingos. If I can acquire a certain level of accuracy I hope I can extinguish out of place smoking materials without spilling a drop while avoiding an assault charge, despite the self defense implications of the 1994 Ohio case - thanks, Carter.