The Perfect Humanoid Symbol, 18

That they are disrespectful towards others out of getting inured to degradation is not an extenuating circumstance, but on the contrary it is an aggravating factor. Oblivious or careless culprits, smokers are not aware of – or just blank – what it’s like to live constantly forced to breathe carefully, under the sword of Damocles of being stabbed in the back at any moment, and indeed being continuously stabbed in the back of your lungs. Not aware of, or blanking, what it’s like to live a life which is a continuous alternation without relief between enduring the torture while aching for its end, and then fearing for the beginning of the next torture, sure as hell in a hellish vicious circle with no way out. Not aware of, or blanking, what it’s like to live a life of apartheid, forced to choose between public places reduced to gas chambers and segregation from social life, monopolised and poisoned by them, out of despair, suffocation and loathing. All of these are abuses, period. It’s about a couple of centuries now that smokers usurped and abused the vital basics of clean air to breathe and clean places to live in, basics that belong to all of us. And the same two centuries it took us for the current laws banning smoking from public places; but in exchange for finally getting rid of some gas chambers, we now have to run the gauntlet at their doors. But even that is not a stable social achievement; on the contrary, we are subject to a creeping and relentless pressure as the smokers, left alone and unrestrained, will little by little but inexorably claw back everything they can usurp.

The peculiarity of smoking as to the amount of life absorbed by consumption itself applies to a less evident facet, too: the humanoid fault I previously nicknamed “impatience”. Behind every addiction there is the inability to confront something – that is, stand comfortably in front of it in order to perceive it for what it actually is in its entirety, and thus act as cause over it suitably, without re−acting and becoming effect of it – and the addiction is a way to blow one’s fuses to escape this having to confront it.