by Bill Nye
Could we recapture some of that spirit with a new national service in the United States? I’m picturing a system in which every US citizen has to serve for 1 year before he or she turns 26 years old. It would be international in scope, so you could serve either domestically or abroad—somewhat like a global version of the Works Progress Administration (WPA) created during the New Deal years. You could join the military, but you could also serve on a crew erecting wind turbines and transmission line towers. You could help develop low-cost photovoltaic cells. You could assist teachers in schools. You could tend to the elderly. Or you could go overseas and work to provide clean water, renewable electricity, and Internet access to citizens of developing nations. You could be an ambassador of Western culture and nerdy knowledge, building collaboration and trust across international lines. Certainly you wouldn’t feel as though you were wasting time on make-work memorization.
What I’m imagining is something bigger than the Peace Corps or even AmeriCorps. It would be a full year, not just a summer, and it would be mandatory. It would be law, and everyone single one of us would have to serve. You could serve right out of high school, after college, or between jobs. But if you were planning to continue on to graduate school, then somewhere during your academic career you’d have to serve. I imagine many grad students would choose the time after a master’s degree and before a PhD. The collaborative spirit of the first Earth Day would be part of the law of the land, regardless of your academic path.
Some of you may bristle at this idea, but I believe that a program of national service would change us for the better and break down a lot of the partisan tropes that divide left and right. Liberals are broadly suspicious of government coercion but are very supportive of the idea of humanitarian programs. Conservatives are broadly suspicious of government social programs but are very supportive of the idea of service to the country. Across the board, there is deep distrust of federal institutions right now. Okay, so suppose each state enacted a state service program. Participants might get tuition to the best state schools in exchange for their time. Then if Indiana, say, had a state service, it would put competitive pressure on Ohio to enact the same sort of legislation. State by state, local services would become mandatory and ubiquitous. Such programs could begin a healing process. I’m hoping to plant a seed here so that a leader might nurture the idea and someday bring us together to serve.
Now look, I’ll remind you right here: I did not serve a single day in the Peace Corps or in the military. But as I compare my experience with that of my parents and their friends and contemporaries, I feel that kind of service could have done a lot for me and would do a great deal for others, too. It could help bring us together, engage us with the rest of the world, reduce our fear of outsiders, and embrace the future. A national service program would cost (tax) money, but the funds spent would immediately find their way back into the economy. The millions of people enrolled in the service would rebuild infrastructure, move us to renewable energy, and work with citizens of other countries to expand access to clean water and digital information. Earth Day was initially considered part of the counterculture. This could instantly be a part of the mainstream.
Imagine along with me here. Someday soon, we could see young Americans hard at work building wind turbines, installing photo-voltaic panels, and setting up water desalination plants where they’re needed. They could be expanding renewable energy in Appalachia or rolling out cellular Internet access in Ethiopia. Every step along the way, they would be chipping away at the partisan and cultural barriers that we’ve erected in so much of American society these days. Each service program would contribute a fraction to fight climate change but could contribute a great deal to a sense of shared purpose—before we get there the hard way, by plunging into a full-on crisis.
Whether or not my “national service corps” concept ever gains any traction, the important point is that there are many ways to recapture the spirit of 1970 and rise to the challenges of today. If Nixon could create the EPA practically overnight in the aftermath of Earth Day, then the current president and the current Congress can certainly make great things happen, too. We just have to agree that it needs to get done and then get going, full speed into the future.
CHAPTER 6
How My Parents Quit Smoking
I hereby claim that if you want to get grown-ups to stop merely talking about important issues like climate change and to start doing something about them, one of the most effective things you can do is get their kids involved in the process. Young people are curious, idealistic, and eager, making them the perfect instigators of science-based change. They also have a huge tactical advantage: They are living at home, so they can perform their persuasive feats on their parents from the closest possible range. I became convinced of these things because of a remarkable adventure I had when I was 12. And it was all to do with cigarettes.
In the 1960s, when I was growing up in Washington, DC, a great many of the adults I knew smoked. In fact, it seemed like almost every grown-up smoked back then. My mom and dad smoked. Even my neighbor’s dad, a medical doctor, smoked. And like virtually every smoker I’ve ever met, they all talked about wanting to quit. They enjoyed smoking after a fashion, but really, deep down, they wanted to stop. Since the 1950s, there have been individual and class-action lawsuits going on against tobacco company executives. I remember them being featured on the television news shows I watched with my family. The execs kept claiming with earnest expressions that they never heard of any connection between smoking and cancer.
My parents absolutely did not want me to start smoking, and they remarked often about how hard it was to quit. Planning to quit smoking was as much a part of the culture as the smoking itself. It was routine to hear radio ads featuring the voice of a firefighter and sound effects of a crackling fire and sirens. The firefighter would intone ominously that this needless destruction was caused by “someone smoking in bed.” But the one message that really made an impression on me featured William Talman, the actor who played District Attorney Hamilton Burger on the hugely popular television drama Perry Mason.
If you’re not hip to this old reference, note how many recent and ongoing television shows feature lawyers: L.A. Law, Law & Order, Boston Legal, The Practice, Ally McBeal, Better Call Saul, and The Good Wife (by no means a complete list). Well, Perry Mason was the first of the genre. Note that the name “Hamilton Burger” sounds a lot like “hamburger,” because this character got ground up every week by our hero Perry Mason, the uncannily brilliant lawyer. Perry (as we call him) always outsmarted the DA and the cops, and he extracted the confession of the real murderer just as the show was going to its last commercial break. Perry brought truth and justice through his relentless application of logic and human insight. I loved this show—loved it.
So when Hamilton Burger—I mean William Talman—came on my television and warned, “By the time you see this, I will be dead. Please don’t smoke!” I was riveted. I felt driven anew. I had to do something to save my parents. I’ll admit, there was also a twinge of “These grown-ups with their ‘do as I say, not as I do’ behavior—it’s not right.” But it was, I suppose, a larval version of my “change the world” impulse. I was just 12, so I had the more modest goal of changing our household. I harassed, er, reminded my parents repeatedly about how they had both promised to give up smoking. And their old soundtrack would repeat: They would respond that they really wanted to quit, but it was really hard, and then usually urge me once again to never, ever start smoking.
As a matter of parental course, they wanted to “enrich my summer”—a great bit of parentspeak for “You’re too old to send to sing-along camp and too young to get a bona fide paying job, but it’s time to get out of the house, Bill.” So for my enrichment, my parents arranged for me to attend a summer program at the Smithsonian Institution in downtown Washington, DC, an easy commute from home. I got to learn all about oceanography, which at the time seemed like the coolest thing po
ssible. For a budding science guy, the summer was a success. For my nicotine-addicted parents, they assumed that they’d bought themselves a few weeks of relief from my meddling, do-gooding ways. Oh, how wrong they were.
To get to the Smithsonian, I took the bus downtown and got to know a group of guys, mostly older, who were in the same program but were a couple of years ahead of me in school. We got to talking and became friends. At some point, we started walking to a slightly more distant bus stop because the route took us by a place of business on Pennsylvania Avenue called Al’s Magic Shop. It was a well-known spot, legendary in the magic world, that ultimately stayed in business for 58 years. Along with your cut-off-your-finger effects, your easily compacted silk flowers, and all sorts of card tricks, Al Cohen sold what were called “cigarette loads.” These small pyrotechnic devices look like the broken-off tip of a toothpick. You poke them into the end of a cigarette. A few minutes or even seconds after the unsuspecting smoker lights up (depending on how deeply the load is embedded), the cigarette explodes—dramatically. Afterward, the cigarette paper is rolled back like a perfectly peeled banana. What’s left of the cigarette looks like an exploded cigar in a Warner Bros. cartoon, the kind that turns Daffy Duck’s face black and knocks his bill sideways. The whole process is destructive and shocking and just plain wonderful. The cigarette loads are basically perfect tools for adolescent mischief.
So as a creative young man prone to experimentation, what do you think I did? I bought some cigarette loads and carefully loaded them into my parents’ cigarettes. That would teach them to keep smoking after they had repeatedly promised me that they would stop. I was an aspiring engineer, and I tinkered a little. I did not exactly follow the instructions, in which the manufacturer recommended emptying some of the tobacco and putting the load right at the end of the cigarette. Instead, I used a straight pin from my mother’s sewing supplies to ever so carefully push the load deeper into the cigarette so that you could not see the load; it was invisible. There may also have been some physics implications that I had only roughly considered when formulating my plan. With the cigarette load fully embedded in the tobacco and constrained by the “hoop stress” of the paper, perhaps its explosion is ever so slightly more forcefully contained.
The whole caper was surprisingly easy to pull off. Cigarette loads are very small, thin as a grain of rice, so concealing them was simple enough. My dad took out his cigarettes when he emptied his pockets each evening. He left them out in the open on his dresser, alongside his wallet and keys. There was no trouble getting my hands on his stash for a few private minutes.
One night my parents went to the next-door neighbors’ house for dinner. That was not an especially uncommon occurrence. Our two families had become good friends. It was summer in Washington, DC, and as you’ve probably gathered by now, Washington summers tend to be stupidly, oppressively hot and humid. Those lazy, late-sunset evenings were fine times for laid-back socializing. Since we did not have air-conditioning, every window was wide open to let in whatever almost-cool breeze we could create with electric fans, fans, and more fans. The same was true next door. So when the cigarettes exploded in the house next door, I could hear every single bright, deeply satisfying pop. Woo hoo!
The grown-ups were surprisingly good-humored about it. They could pretty easily guess who was behind the prank. I could hear them laughing but pressing on, trying cigarette after cigarette over their after-dinner coffee and dessert. Pop-pop-pop. Every few minutes there was a new attempt to light up, and a new surprise. As it turns out, I had incorporated a fabulous extra detail in my explosive experiment that was unexpectedly effective. The time from the lighting to the detonation of each cigarette was not uniform; it was randomized, depending on how deeply I had pushed in each load. Once the loads started going off, neither my parents nor my neighbors could tell which cigarette would pop off next, or what would happen when they lit up another one. Since I was working on a budget, a few of the cigs were unloaded altogether. The cigarette–smoker interaction was unpredictable, which made it especially psychologically disruptive.
If you want to train your lab rat to tap a lever with his or her paw (there are rat males and rat females—you can look it up), you rig up a mechanism to give the rat a sunflower seed or similar delicious reward each time he or she steps on the lever. If you want your rat to avoid a metal plate, you give your rat a mild shock whenever she or he sets a paw in that area. That’s the kind of stuff that Ivan Pavlov figured out. But if you want to make the rat go a little nuts, you give the reward or jolt only now and then, and do it at random. Remove certainty and replace it with nerve-jangling chaos. That is what I, the budding and not-quite-evil genius, had done to the grown-ups. Bwah, ha, ha, ha, haaaa . . .
Despite their encouraging laughs, my parents were not entirely amused by what I had done. They had a talk with me about my explosive stunt, about how it startled their friends, about how it was wrong to mess with their property. But as for my motivation, what were they going to say? “We want to quit—but don’t make it so we are afraid to smoke.”
“Why not, Mom? Why not, Dad?”
“Well, um . . .”
As a science-minded guy who has managed to live in our society for 6 decades, I am deeply aware that addiction is serious business. Burning tobacco, especially the nicotine it releases, affects smokers’ brains. Addicts of all stripes start using the drug or engaging in the addictive activity to feel good, but eventually they have to keep going to, as the saying goes, “not feel bad.” The effects on the brain alone are amazing and troubling. But along with the chemical aspect of addiction, there is also the behavioral part. Smoking becomes a habit, almost a ritual. The same thing can happen with alcohol, other drugs, even unhealthy eating or gambling.
For example, my parents and our neighbors routinely lit up their cigarettes after dessert. It’s what they, and a lot of people like them, did back then as a normal part of being social. It’s what we saw in the movies and on television (even, yes, on Perry Mason). But the effect of those cigarette loads was powerful and lasting, even beyond what I had hoped for. My prank did more than startle my parents. It shook them up. It made them acutely aware of their addiction, to the point that they managed to quit.
With this in mind, it is reasonable to conclude that by breaking a habitual behavior, we can start breaking free of the addiction. I wasn’t plotting, at least not consciously, to trigger some kind of Pavlovian response in my mom and dad. I merely wanted to remind them, in an emphatic way, how nasty cigarettes are. Okay, I also liked the idea of making them jump, and apparently they did that quite expressively. (They were next door and I couldn’t see their reactions in the moment.)
The night of the exploding cigarettes led to my parents quitting for real. My cigarette loads apparently accomplished what my years of youthful nagging could not. They could never be sure after that just how many cigarette loads I’d invested in, let alone where I had gotten my supply. And what if I decided to strike again, despite the talk? They had no way to know whether the next cancer stick they were about to light might turn into a dramatic and disruptive event. My parents were shaken out of their routine in a way that interfered with their social addiction.
I realize that my prank was not the whole reason they quit smoking; it probably wasn’t even the main reason. But it did help them change their behavior, and that was enough to nudge them into giving up a habit that had stuck with them for many years.
I should add here, loud and clear, that I do not generally advocate using explosives on your friends and family, no matter how virtuous your motives. I don’t want to lose any potential readers, plus it’s just so dreadfully . . . impolite. I loaded up my parents’ cigarettes only because I was quite certain those little charges from Al’s Magic Shop were harmless. What I most definitely do advocate is being an activist for change in your own home. When you are trying to change the world, it is often most effective to start with the people you personally influence the most. And
if you can create that change using a scientific process, all the better.
My detonating cigarettes were part of a much broader movement, as it turned out. William Talman died a few months later, at the too-young age of 53, but the antismoking movement continued and grew. Smoking is far, far less common these days, at least in Western societies. Social norms are changing. It’s banned in bars and clubs in much of the country. In New York City, many restaurateurs made grim predictions that business would plummet if patrons were not permitted to sit around and smoke with their coffee after dessert. That’s not what happened, though. Instead, more people stuck around for longer and ordered more food. Restaurant revenues went up. Today, smoking rarely even shows up as a cool thing in modern movies, unless they are oh-so-hip swing-era period pieces.
Just as in the Nye household, a lot of those changes began on a local and personal scale. Family members urged their loved ones to abandon a dangerous habit. A relatively small number of very engaged people started making the social environment different, and eventually a large number of people started behaving in new and much healthier ways. This is a really big deal. Millions of people stopped smoking, millions more never started, and as a result, millions who would have died of lung cancer or suffered from chronic obstructive pulmonary disorder will not. That’s a lovely, loud echo of the little noise that adolescent Bill managed with a few well-targeted cigarette loads.