To The Smoker
By Rachel Cotton
Fine, smoke; feed the hand of death with green and addiction. In
most cases, I have no sympathy whatsoever for the emphysema, the cancer, the heart
disease, and the overall suffering that await, or have already infested you, as you will
have brought them upon yourself. Instead, my commiseration lies with your victims: the
babies whom you so selfishly damage during pregnancy, the children whom you taint, whom
you raise in a toxic environment, and the people who surround you during your detrimental
lives: the nurses, the waiters, the friends, and the strangers, who are unwillingly forced
to inhale your poison. I weep for them and for those who, unknowingly, invited the tar of
early death into their lives, who began smoking before it was known to be lethal, those
who were truly exploited by tobacco companies. For you, however, I shed no tears. Instead,
I emit hatred, anger, outrage, and mostly disgust, not wasted on your demise, as you
knowingly kill yourself, a(n) (ignorant) choice that you are free to (and, in my opinion,
selfishly) make for NOBODY BUT YOURSELF, but against you, for the nonsmokers who surround
you, whom you so unjustly destroy. My emotions struggle to scald your self-absorption,
wandering to rectify the lives of those whom you kill in your destructive strip mine
toward extinction.
I always wonder what makes you smoke; do you enjoy the not so
profound sensation that it brings to your body and mind? Does it make you feel more mature
or more mysterious or, maybe, more rebellious? I am truly interested in how, exactly,
smoking transforms you. If you will sacrifice your life and your health and your purity,
as well as that of everyone around you, to be dependent on smoking, I would imagine that
the transformation it brings about is quite dramatic, yet I have never known this to be
the case. Until I am "enlightened" by someone who can explain the spirituality
of cigarettes to me, the only metamorphosis that will be apparent in my mind is that from
a healthy person to a woman donating a quarter of her pay check to a corporation that
preys upon and owns her, to a man who has tubes in his nose and mouth and throat and
carries around a tank of oxygen because his respiratory system has moldered, and to an
eight-year-old girl who cries every night because nicotine has stolen her father.
My body runs and hides and fights and strains against it, but your
smoke inevitably finds me. It finds everyone. You appear the height of glamour, sucking on
death. I sit comfortably in my soft chair, capriciously passing time, and you spit at me
your pompous venom. And it burns me. I hope you taste the hatred in my eyes as I glare at
you, a hatred not for your choice to smoke, but for your choice to subject me to it.
I walk outside, inhaling the fresh scent of evening air that fills
me. You walk, not nearly far enough away, and puff, and blow your decay at me, providing
me with the now stale gas that I breathe. Thank you very much.
Why don't all of you smokers move to your own world, where you can
blow your putrescence on each other and make each other reek and rot and die? Treat your
true neighbor as you now treat me and as you treat yourself. Do not misunderstand me; I am
not asking you to isolate yourself unjustly or suffer in any way which you don't already
cause yourself to, for I am completely willing to give you this world and all of its
comforts, if you will give me one of my own. All I am asking is that I and all the other
victims of your egocentricity are allowed a place in which the air that we breathe is pure
by our standards, just as the air in your world is "pure" by yours.
In no way am I trying to infringe upon your freedom to smoke; you
are free to enjoy smoking, if smoking, to you, means enjoyment. If you respect my choice
to breathe chastity, then I will condone your choice to smoke, under two minor
stipulations; my only requests are these: just as you do not wish others to encroach upon
your habits and lifestyle by discriminating against you because you smoke, that you not
invade and contaminate the lives of those who do not smoke with your pollution and all the
slimy complications which surround it; this includes, obviously, not subjecting nonsmokers
to your contagion and, also, not expecting us to be, in any way, responsible for paying
any of the $100 billion per year in healthcare costs and lost productivity with which you
burden yourselves, as well as every American taxpayer.
If you die your life and respect mine, I will live mine and condone, although never understand, yours.