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Aziz BAKAY 20300841

English 102-13

Diane STEWART

16.02.2004

A Community Problem : Smoking

         There is a real big problem in all over the world which is the enemy of mankind’s health and a hostile fact to social structure and unity; smoking. It has many dangerous sides to many cases such as dividing social places into smoking and non-smoking areas, giving deductions to economical situation as a serious impact and making the self and persons, who are closer to the smoker, get effected negative. This case is strongly related to our lifes.

         This community problem is valid in every part of our lifes, even if you are a bureaucrat or a worker or a student in a university. We can say that the most effect of this problem is seen in education life. If  I happen to give an instance from my own life as a student in Bilkent, I cross over many places that have given the allowance smoking within the building. Actually the places in which smoking is not allowed, are too few to count. Although, I got serious thoughts of not going to such places, in many cases I have to go and there, I feel not quite confident. These persons get an idea going to somewhere else unlike those places. This condition has a negative effect on the persons who are against smoking like me.  Of course it is not only up to those places, also seen in dornitories and any other places.

         One another personal experince is that I get bothered by the disgusting smell of cigarette, in dornitory I live. In dornitory, it is not allowed smoking in the corridors or in the personal rooms. Even though there is a smoking room in every floor of the building and even though everyone exactly knows this, nobody uses these rooms for not to be the person who disturbs others. The many of them have their cigarettes in their rooms and in the corridors of the building. The smell of the cigarette sometimes gets intolerant for some people. This case can be said as a community problem which is caused by many reasons.

         This problem in universities, has some different reasons than normal life of other people. People generally smoke because of the economical situation or some bad experiences of job which creates low-morale. In fact in the education life, students start smoking by the help(!) of the friends and some different feelings of affectation. The friends are the people who can make the person elevated in the social life and they are the people who can make the person start bad habits or get unprincipled. So, we can say that the friend group holds the potential to give a certain way to that person’s life in both good and bad ways. There is one other thing that make the person start smoking, weird feelings from persons inner world that is about to be based in the teenager ages. Affectation is a powerful instinct that can make person to show the self as an adult. We can predict that this kind of feelings appear from the insufficent self-esteem that forces person to do such kind of things like smoking. These were only two of the reasons and with all of those things, this problem has a great effect on society.

         In my opinion, one of the biggest effect of  this problem is the dividing the ares into smoking and non-smoking places. It shows a sociological conflict in many social constitutions. There are places that have certain divisions. This is social inequality for entering to many places. Actually the first thing that come to mind easily is that smoking is a real danger and harm for social health. It wouldn’t be  a serious social health problem if its harm is only concerned with the smoker, however it has serious harm to passive smokers. In this viewpoint it is certainly a social problem and this case seriously needs solutions.

         This serious problem can be solved by some education activities which should be performed mostly by the family. As an education activity, we can say the conferences concerning about the harm of smoking, or symposiums that are orginized to create a certain conscious about this matter and to form attitudes. The family’s role is starting at the beginning of everything because its effect is at high rate. The parents and any other members of the family, first of everything, should be a good representer about this problem. They should show their attitudes and thoughts obviously instead of giving advice every time they meet or talk about smoking. Rather than talking about the harm of it, it might be more effective talking about in terms of general negative effects related sociological patterns. For a person who is conscious and enough well-informed, these things will be quite persuasive to give it up.

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