There are a few smokers in my building. Which is sad, and rather stupid, I would say. We are all on low incomes, which is why we are living here. There are two heavy smokers across the hall from me. They live next door to each other. One is living with rather a serious mental illness (he was once a problem, by the way). The other is actually very nice and pleasant, but is often outside smoking on the sidewalk. They are both chronic coughers. I hear them. Day after day, and I think, how pathetic. Even with everything we know about smoking and its dangers. Especially for people on low incomes who can't afford the luxury of a three to four hundred dollar a month habit.
The sad and sick irony is that most people who still smoke are on low incomes. There are a lot of reasons for this, but I think the drive for empowerment is particularly problematic. There is still this leftover badass glamour from vintage Hollywood movies that silently promotes smoking as the ultimate symbol of badass cool. The chronically disempowered will grasp at whatever they can reach in order to feel empowered, even if the empowerment is nothing but enslaving themselves, in this case to a toxic nicotine addiction When you are poor and struggling for daily survival, you are simply going to cope the best way you can, and there is not going to be a lot of brain energy left for thinking out the consequences.
I sometimes wonder if that is the other reason why it is so hard for people to quit, I mean people who are already poor and disempowered. Losing that one symbol of self-empowerment, the smouldering cigarette, no matter how dated a symbol it might be, is for some one insult too many. So, even if having a sense or illusion of mastery over their lives is going to destroy their health, wreck their sense of wellbeing and send them to an early death, they are still simply not going to quit.
I think I get it. But it is so sad and so stupidly sad. If I smoked, I would not be able to travel. I would not be able to save money. And I would be feeling like shit, while standing outside every day in the rain and cold weather, digging in my heels while digging my own early grave.
Of course it's difficult to quit. I really wonder if someone really has to come to value their lives enough before they can really quit, and poor people are often so beaten down already that there is little incentive left to care. And this is one desperate and nasty addiction. I remember the first time I saw people picking up butts off the sidewalk and trying to smoke them. Gross, of course, and so very sad.
I was myself a light and infrequent smoker for a few years. I didn't inhale deeply, which I think protected me from becoming addicted. Like many of my generation, I grew up with a very easy going attitude about second-hand smoke. Even in the eighties, after having quit, I was still okay with guests smoking in my home. Then it was banned in restaurants, cafes and indoor public places. I jumped on the bandwagon, discovering the pure beauty of smoke free air. I became an intolerant anti smoking Nazi. I still am. And I still do my best to avoid inhaling secondhand smoke.
There is still quite a death dance about smoking. I am not sure that it will ever leave uss. I wonder if this could also be a curse. Tobacco, originally was used only ceremonially by many indigenous people. The Europeans appropriated it and turned it into a marketing cash cow. Could our chronic crisis of smoking, nicotine addiction and health problems and accelerated deaths be also part of a curse for this insidious cultural appropriation? And of course it is the most vulnerable who are going to suffer the most.
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