Rather Fight Than Switch?

I wonder how many baby boomers remember those TV cigarette commercials featuring an actor holding a smoke, sporting a black eye and saying “I’d rather fight than switch.” I guess they ran those ads from the 1960s to 1981.

I think of those commercials when I read the news. There are a couple of Iowa news items about a University of Northern Iowa (UNI) professor requiring his students to wear masks or suffer the consequences to their lab grades. He’s suffering the consequences because he’s going up against policies of the state Regents and UNI, which prohibit mask mandates. He’s doing it to protect others from COVID-19 infection. It sounds like he’d rather fight than switch.

The Governor of Iowa has signed into law a ban on applying mask mandates. However, Iowa City Mayor Bruce Teague has just extended “until further notice” a city-wide mask mandate that started August 18 and was set to expire today. Iowa Attorney General Tom Miller has been studying the situation for weeks and has apparently made no decision, despite the Governor’s office saying the mandate is “illegal” and “unenforceable.” I guess Mayor Teague would rather fight than switch.

There has been an executive order by President Biden to mandate COVID-19 vaccines for the many hospitals which have over a certain number of employees and are paid by Medicare and Medicaid. Headlines indicate there are many who would rather quit their jobs than get the jabs, which would not make patient care any easier. I guess they would rather fight than switch.

A man in Germany recently walked into a convenience store to buy beer and when the clerk asked him to put on a mask, the man left angry, came back wearing a mask and shot the clerk dead. I guess he’ll do the rest of his fighting in prison.

There a few songs about fighting and switching. I don’t remember Ruby Johnson’s version of “I’d Rather Fight Than Switch.” There was another version done by a group called The Tomboys, a group of female vocalists I’ve never heard of who were also performing in the 1960s. It looks like country star George Jones did a reversal of it with “I’d Rather Switch Than Fight.”

I wonder how things would be if people would start saying “I’d Rather Talk Than Fight.”