Rhetorical Analysis

Tobacco has been around for hundreds of years, and millions upon millions of people smoked it heavily without knowing the consequences and the toll it takes on your body. It makes your teeth yellow, blackens your lungs, makes it harder to breathe, make you more susceptible to cancer, and shorten your lifespan.

Many people don't realize how harmful it is physically and mentally. Without realizing it, they become cranky, restless, and anxious if they don't have their tobacco fix. That's a lot of power that tobacco has over them. The worst thing about it isn't how it damages your body, but the addiction. For people who don't smoke, when they're stressed, unhappy, among other things, what do you do? Relax by reading a book, watch a movie, go out in the town with friends. What does smokers do when they have the same symptoms? They light a cigarette to relieve it, no matter how temporary it is. It becomes a cycle, just going on forever.

In Lunsford et al. 2009, page 109, it talks about tobacco executives brainstorming ideas how to get children into smoking their products. What kind of brilliant ideas they came up with? They thought of introducing fruit-flavored chewing tobacco, tobacco gumballs in an effort to get them hooked.

With all the technology available to us to research, and with all the evidence we have, we can prove tobacco is bad, but yet many people still smoke it anyway. All restaurants, bars and many other places forbids smoking cigarettes now, so that's a step in the right direction. A small step, but an important step.

I remember reading in a basketball magazine called "SLAM", there was one ad in it called "Truth". It said Tobacco companies prepare for the future by advertising their products on signs below counters at stores and many other places at a child's eye level. If we can't protect our next generation, where will it stop? We can't let our children make the same mistakes our generation did growing up with tobacco. The ball is in our court, and it's all up to us to do something with it.