On August 28, my local newspaper ran a Knight Ridder story by Benjamin Lowe about the late civil rights activist Bayard Rustin.

Rustin was the intellectual who taught Martin Luther King about non-violence and civil disobedience as effective tools to advance social progress and who convinced MKL to proceed in the nonviolent, civil disobedience direction. Rustin was also a driving force behind the 1963 March on Washington when MLK delivered his famous "I have a dream speech" [40 years ago this week for those of you who can remember it -- and I remember watching it raptly and proudly in black & white on TV -- God! How old am I getting to be? Sheesh].

Anyhow, the writer Lowe has this sentence in his piece: "Rustin, fueled by coffee and cigarettes, lined up groups and speakers to bring the movement's case to Washington forcefully and arranged transportation and security."

Isn't it odd that a reporter doing a commemorative history piece about the March & about Rustin would mention his smoking? I figure that reporter Lowe either thinks that smoking is somehow a little bit admirable [Ooh, let me sneak in this little dig at self-righteous liberals who admire MKL & Rustin] or else negative [Imagine this righteous man smoking? How awful. Shame on him!] I don't know, you understand, why the reporter said this and am only guessing here.

But in any event, the piece ends by saying that Rustin died in 1987 at age 75. He had been hospitalized with a burst appendix and peritonitis. No doubt, anti-smoker lurkers on this site and their idiot friends elsewhere would call Rustin's death premature and smoking-related.

I don't THINK so!

MLK's dream of a society in which character, not color, made the difference has been perverted and set upside down by black "leaders" like Jackson and Sharpton who say color, not character, should be deciding factors in all sorts of ways. Similarly, the legitimate concern of health officials and citizens that smoking has ill effects for some smokers been perverted and turned upside down by the "leaders" of the anti-smoker movement who preach ceaselessly the lies that ETS harms non-smokers and that the non-existant "dangers" of ETS trump Constitutionally protected private property rights.

It sickens and angers me. And it makes me long for a more civilized time in American life -- yeah even back unto 1963 -- where there was, ironically, more liberty in the US for ALL Americans than there is today.

"Rustin, fueled by coffee and cigarettes"

The writer's just being descriptive. Fueled by coffee and doughnuts, fueled by drive and ambition...

Just the writer coming out in him I think. And I wouldn't doubt if the writer smokes or used to smoke because when I'm tired I'm fueled by Coke and cigarettes.

Might that simply be known as "filler" to get the word count up?