So, I'm working on a story and thinking about a Rapids Jam column when my email alert clinks to let me know I've got mail.

It's from NPR and it's about the new warning labels going on cigarettes and I immediately get perturbed.

The government thinks we're all idiots and have been hiding under rocks or in caves like Japanese soldiers who never realized the war was over.

Everyone knows smoking is bad for you and putting new labels on cigs of holes in throats, corroded lungs and people in iron lungs isn't going to stop people with the habit who don't want to quit and probably won't stop those who want to try it from buying a pack. The new warning labels may even encourage people to buy more, just so they can get the latest one, perhaps the baby in the incubator or the corpse lying on the cooling board because he smoked himself silly with Marlboro Reds.

One can imagine the kids after school comparing packs to see who got the coolest and grossest warning label and start trading them like they used to trade Pokeman cards or like we did as kids with baseball cards.

Come on, government, is what I was thinking.

That led me to think of the many things the government hasn't decided to put graphic warning labels on, namely alcohol products.

Depending on your view, whether you believe the second hand smoke conspiracy theorists, smoking is pretty much an individual act, an individual choice of a possible death sentence and one in which you're ultimately taking a risk in which you harm or kill yourself.

Get behind the wheel of a car drunk and you risk cutting short someone else's life so why not put bloody crash scenes on bottles of Jack Daniels? Why not put decapitated bodies on cans of Bud of some poor victim trapped inside a burning car on a can of hard lemonade?

Since the government is concerned about our health and well being and just recently released a new food pyramid, why don't they put graphic warning labels on junk food, you know, some tubby kid on a pizza box trying to catch his breath as other youngsters make fun of him in gym class. Show a kid gagging and turning purple from swallowing a Happy Meal toy.

The government's label happiness doesn't have to stop with cigarettes. They can put warning labels on appliances, say a person with a severed finger who tried to stop the blades of a fan or the electrocuted body of someone who took their plugged in toaster with them in bathtub.

I don't believe the government needs to be our parents or our conscience. I don't believe the government is there to be our common sense. Is the government going to start putting warning labels on trees, showing a picture of someone with a broken neck after they tried to climb and fell attempting to pick an apple, which should probably have a pesticide label genetically implanted in the seed that grows as the apple grows? In the government's view, there should be a falling hazard label on trees, perhaps bees and wasps should come with labels saying, “May cause stinging.” Are they going to put labels on poisonous snakes that say, “Handling may cause death.”

I don't know, maybe it's me, maybe I have common sense that the government doesn't think I do. I know the risks of smoking, drinking, putting a fork in the toaster to pry out toast and I know the dangers of putting a kid's toy in my mouth and swallowing.

Maybe the government needs to let parents be parents and tell their youngsters the consequences that can occur by participating in risky behavior.

I don't know, however, by some of the stories we've reported on recently, maybe the government is going to start putting warning labels on parents. On some of them, that might not be a bad idea — Lance Martin