Perhaps your Mommy and Daddy have told you that smoking is "bad for you" and that you should not do it. Perhaps you have seen hateful television advertisements claiming that smoking cigarettes will kill you. Perhaps you have listened to statements coming from previous immoral Presidential administrations, saying that smoking cigarettes is "not cool." Kids, you need to know this: Any anti-cigarette propaganda that you hear is not to be trusted. The truth of the matter is that smoking cigarettes has a miniscule (this is a word that means "too small to be statistically significant") impact on human health, and anybody who would claim otherwise is a bad person. You know about bad people, don't you? Hopefully, Mommy and Daddy have taught you that you should never take rides with or accept candy from strangers. Think about this, kids .. if you won't get in a stranger's car or eat a stranger's Snickers bar, why on Earth should you believe what a stranger says about cigarettes?

Recent studies have suggested that the number of children who smoke cigarettes is declining (kids, "declining" means that fewer and fewer children are starting to smoke.) Yet at the same time, society is decaying at a rapid rate.

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Kids, when you grow up and get a job and a family, you will eventually establish what is called a "401(k) account." Basically, this is like a bank account where you put away money that allows you to retire. The trick here, kids, is that the amount of money that is made by the "401(k) account" depends on how well the stock market performs. In particular, it depends on how well the individual companies that you are invested in perform. My "401(k) account" contains an awful lot of stock from tobacco companies, and in recent years, that stock has performed terribly. As a result of this, the financial future of my family is in jeopardy. (Kids, this means that my family is in bad trouble and that we will need to eat out of garbage cans if these tobacco companies don't start making more money.)

Last Easter, my wife and I gave our youngest son Micah a stuffed rabbit to sleep with. Micah loves that rabbit; he named it "Snowflake" and sleeps with it every night, his little arm draped tenderly around its cotton body. Kids, I will tell you this: unless you start smoking and help out these tobacco companies that my family depends on, we will not be able to pay our utility bills next winter. We will be forced to burn things from around the house to provide heat to keep our family alive. Kids, unless you start smoking cigarettes, we will be forced to burn Snowflake. Have you ever had a favorite stuffed animal? Can you imagine how sad my boy will be if we have to burn his favorite to keep our family warm?

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