There are commercials that lurk in the night.
They wait for the darkness to descend before emerging from wherever they hide during the daylight hours to brow beat us into believing that celebrities have a secret agenda.
Like the illuminati, these stars are determined to indoctrinate our youth to do one thing: Serve tobacco companies without question and convincing us to smoke as much nicotine as our young bodies can handle.
The Truth campaign shows pictures of celebrities smoking to a funky beat, proclaiming them to be unpaid sponsors of tobacco companies.
The Truth campaign insists that these celebrities have so much sway over us that just simply seeing Justin Beiber holding a cigarette is enough to send us in droves to the nearest gas station, clamoring for a pack.
It can be said that this is a valiant effort.
Nine percent of teens are smoking, whereas in 2000 when the campaign began, 20 percent of teens smoked.
Cigarettes contain nicotine, which is highly addictive. Cigarettes are known to be linked to lung and throat cancer.
There is no doubt that smoking is bad for you.
But is it really necessary to run an ad crucifying celebrities for what they choose to do in their personal lives?
The ad insists that these pictures, which are obviously candid and many seem to be unaware that they are being photographed, are free advertising.
Another ad ran in conjunction with the first, claiming that The Truth Campaign was contacted by various publicists who were angry over the use of these pictures without consent. They promptly showed the same photos again still without consent.
There is something to be said about the campaign’s understanding of the word “no.”
Consent, even in what can be considered a trivial matter such as this, is important.
Without it, you are still going against someone’s wishes and publicizing a photo they may not want seen.
The campaign insists that it wants photos such as these to stop circulating, but they have never really circulated until the commercial began to air.
The true point is that the campaign is using flawed logic in their crusade. According to the Truth, just by simply being photographed with a particular product, you are advertising that product.
There are tons of photos of celebrities drinking Dasani water. Does that mean they are spokespeople for Dasani? No. Obviously they were just thirsty.
It seems that to the Truth, the only product that matters is a cigarette. But there are bigger problems in the celebrity community.
There are hundreds of pictures of stars drinking and partying.
Studies show that by 18, over 70 percent of teens drink. Ten percent of 12-year-olds, 20 percent of 13-year-olds and by 15, approximately 50 percent of young adults drink, according to toosmarttostart.gov.
This is obviously a much bigger issue than smoking. Cigarettes can kill you in the long run and so can alcohol, but cigarettes do not impair judgment.
When teens drink, they tend to drink far more than adults.
Binge drinking is dangerous. It leads to impaired decisions and rash judgment, as all drinking can.
This isn’t to say alcohol is evil. In college you find out that many people tend to think the exact opposite, but it goes to show that too much of anything is bad for you.
In this day and age, anything and everything is linked to cancer.
Let’s be real, there are a lot bigger fish to fry.
It’s nice to be the generation that ends smoking for good, but why can’t we be the generation that ends racism? Sexism? Domestic violence?
Celebrities do all of the above.
Inhaling tobacco seems to be the least of our worries when NFL stars can knock out their wives on camera and simply get a tap on the wrist.
But it’s all good, y’all. We’re shaming celebrities into not smoking.
We did it. We changed the world.
Religion can be spoken about freely, yet we tread softly when publically mentioning it.
But, the hardest idea to grasp is that having the right to spread religious awareness is certainly not the same as pushing beliefs on others.
While people reserve the right to practice religious freedom and to speak without restraint about any faith they choose, forcing others to listen isn’t freedom of speech; it’s harassment.
There are over 127 major religions and seven billion people on earth with seven billion different views of God. Some love Him, some fear Him, some question His existence and some are still searching for Him.
Some will decide that God plays no role in the trials and tribulations of life, while others will find faith the moment they see their newborn child take the first breath of being.
Whether we discover where we spiritually belong in a pew on Sunday morning or on a lonely drive with no destination, the journey to finding or forgetting God is what determines our views. We can’t be told what and who to believe in, or to even believe in anything at all.
What we learn, who we meet and the challenges we face are what we remember when we stand before Him, not the church members that knock on our front doors, or the people that stand in the quad condemning us all to hell.
And if the church goer at your front door changes your perspective, let them. Be baptized in one church, change your mind, and be baptized in another. Let what you learned in biology class make you question evolution and the powers above.
Learning from life experiences and questioning God’s ways isn’t sin; it’s human. It’s human to change emotionally, mentally, and spiritually when physical surroundings change. It’s human to simply be curious and indecisive.
Faith only exists because there are people that believe strongly enough in it to make it a reality and a way of life. Without doubters and differences, the strength of religion would never have anything to be measured against.
Because of that, religion without true belief is weak.
Never practice out of habit, don’t follow just because your parents or friends do, and don’t ever think one religion is superior to another. In a time that seems to have the explanation for everything in a test tube or on a database, people believing in any God at all is a miracle in itself.
