If someone tells you throwing trash from the car window is forbidden, do not agree, inasmuch as in Armenia there is no social justice. And because there is no justice, therefore, we should make landfills on every step. Is it not logical? Well, if we lived to some extent in a fair, law-abiding country, in that case, we would have taken care of the cleanness of the city and the Republic.
If you are told that in the conditions of a right-hand traffic there should be no right-wing cars, it is also wrong. Why is it wrong? It is wrong because 1 million live in poverty in Armenia. It is also very logical. If, for example, there were half million poor people, then it would have been possible to think of having left-hand cars.
If you are told that smoking in public places is forbidden, forasmuch as it is possible that in those places there are also non-smokers, it is a nonsense, because in Armenia elections are falsified. It is understandable that people smoke because of the grief of the shortage of the authorities’ legitimacy and they will start a healthy lifestyle only if they have a legitimate government, is it not? Fair elections will make people become more caring towards personal and other people’s health.
If there is no wish to be a normal citizen and a normal human, all arguments are acceptable. Especially, in the case of this latest struggle against smoking, when the ordinary populism, a contradiction to the not the highest circles of the authorities on a relatively “neutral” topic, as well as “Ingo Armenia’s” business competitors’ interests gathered in a single “bunch”.
I am for that in food objects, state departments, transportation, elevators, and bus stops smoking is forbidden entirely. It is another question that our state has not thought of effective ways by which it will be possible to implement that prohibition yet. It seems to me that making the fines higher is not an effective way. And the issue is not the following populist argument: “do you give salary to this people enough for such fines?” The issue is more simple: if they do not succeed to fine the people smoking in public places when the fine, take, is 5000 AMD, then they will not succeed in it when the fine is 50 or 500.000 AMD. If the previous and milder law does not work, then it will not also work in case of “stricter” provisions. Nothing disgraces the correct idea as much as the unrealizable declarations “left in the air”.
Aram ABRAHAMYAN
