I grew up in the Great Age of Smoke. Wherever you went, you could not escape the puffs in public and private. People lighted up in offices, stores, restaurants, hospitals, doctors’ offices, indoor arenas, the back of buses, and even while sitting in the last rows on airplanes. Ashtrays were everywhere, brimming with butts, and TV and movies were filled with sexy smokers and ads with the Marlboro Man, Joe Camel, and beautiful people living happy, active lives while smoking.

At home, in our small New York apartment, my mom smoked two packs of cigarettes a day and my dad came home from work to light a cigar or a pipe while watching TV and doing a crossword puzzle.

I was eight years old in 1965 when the surgeon general began putting health warnings on cigarette packs. I showed my mom the scary looking typeface and message on her pack of Salems, and she shrugged, and said, “It’s a bad habit. Don’t you or your brothers take it up.” We never did. I think we’d had enough second-hand smoke for a lifetime by our teens.

In fact, I cheered the growing anti-smoking movements of the 1970s, which led to legal bans of smoking in most public spaces, as well as in offices and even in apartment buildings. To those who asserted personal rights, I would say that we stop people from polluting our drinking water, how much more so for the air we breathe. Big Tobacco got what it deserved in the lawsuits and payouts in the 1990s for decades of deception and disregard for public and personal health.

Why do I bring this up? Because smoking seems to be making a comeback, not only in the form of vaping, but also in the more familiar form of cigarettes, cigars and pipes. And recently, there’s even reports of growing numbers among church-going kids. A recent article in the confirms what I have been seeing among the friends and Catholic schoolmates of my 20-something sons. Actually, I saw the trend beginning some thirty years ago among Traditional Mass devotees, who seemed to think that taking up smoking went naturally with Latin missals and tweed jackets. I thought it was an affectation more than an affection for smoking, but apparently the huffing and puffing have been handed down to Gen Z.

So, for whatever it’s worth, let me shout into the smoke-filled abyss: cigarettes STINK. Smoking kills. Even cigars and pipes can cause cancer. Don’t get hooked on the current Gen Z trends or the reworked wiles of Big Tobacco.

To a Boomer like me, who suffered and held my breath through the Great Age of Smoke, it is especially distressful to see a creeping return of smoking among the young. We worked so hard to clear the air, so that they could breathe freely in public, only now to see kids lighting up on campus, and smell the surreal scents of vapes (or worse) while walking the streets or driving the roads. Just when our generation made smokers something akin to public pariahs, our kids are picking up the habit and making it respectable again?

Perhaps the popular series Mad Men is partly to blame. Aired on cable TV, it skirted the ban of smoking on mainstream TV, and made the marketing of cigarettes the central theme and smoking look social and sexy. Movies today are rife with smoking, as I can see from any number of trailers on the web.

The Register article about young Catholic smokers attributes the trend to popular conservative podcasters such as Michael Knowles and Matt Fradd, who make cigars part of their persona and social-media shtick. There’s also the iconic pipe-smoking image of St. Pier Giorgio Frassati, the patron of many Catholic young adult groups, and the timeless tales of homey, puffing Hobbits spun out by that noted pipe-wielder Tolkien—not to mention Chesterton’s omnipresent cigars. To the tradition-minded, smoking seems closely related to great literature as well as intellectual and social engagement.

Indeed, some of the college students quoted in the Register article say smoking (especially pipes) helps them to concentrate, focus on their subjects, relax in contemplation, and break the ice at parties. A few even question the health dangers, especially with occasional or social smoking.

Maybe. But here’s what I know. My mother’s health was declining until she decided to quit smoking in 1973. She enrolled in a well-known smoke-cessation program and went through the most difficult year of her life, stopping, starting again, and eventually quitting cigarettes for good. It was one of the happiest achievements of her life. And she lived another 45 years smoke-free, to see her grandchildren, which she would not have done if she’d kept up her bad habit.

Her choices were an immense life-affirming sign of hope for me. Let her be an example when you think of lighting up.