“Get out of here before you infect us all you filthy pig!” the man took a hurried step away from the hostile crowd. “We don’t want your kind near us! Don’t touch him Billy, he could be contagious.” His walk turned into a sprint and he disappeared into an ally, a rag of a blanket his only possession that offered protection from the cold. The locals usually left him alone – barring a few schoolchildren who hurled pebbles at him on their way home every evening, he was allowed to stay unmolested in a neglected corner of the public park. But a woman had succumbed to lung cancer in the town hospital last night and public anger was now high. “SECOND-HAND SMOKE MURDERS ANOTHER! HOW MUCH LONGER CAN WE TOLERATE SMOKERS?” was the local headline. The man found himself harassed wherever he went today, mindful that were he to run into a group of real bullies, they would probably kick him to death.
Rumors of the government establishing a Smoker Colony, a desolate settlement on the borders of each city where smokers would be forced to live away from the rest of the world, had reached his ears about a month ago, though he had dismissed it back then as a myth. “We aren’t lepers,” he reasoned, “to be loaded up into buses and sent away to live out our existence in isolation. Even the non-smokers wouldn’t do that to us.” But he had been wrong. Smokers, including those who lived near temples and train stations without troubling a soul, were now being herded into police vans, after which they were never heard from again. Surprisingly, some handed themselves over to the authorities without a fuss, for they would at least be able to light up a Marlboro in this designated slum colony for smokers without having to look over their shoulders for a lynch mob. Besides, these measures were far better than the recommendations made to the government by People for the Extermination of Tobacco Addicts, an organization that championed human rights by procaliming humanity needed to be “cleansed” of smokers.
The man shuddered as his shivering hands struggled to hold on to the blanket, careful not to attract too much attention to himself. He had been kicked out of his house and fired from his job several years ago, when caught in the closet puffing away on a cigarette. Smoking, renamed ‘Tobacco Addiction’ after the Great PR War between pressure groups and tobacco companies (won by the former), is curable only if successfully spotted and diagnosed in its early stages. The man was already in his seventh year as a smoker when exposed; even advanced techniques like bombarding him with images that say “SMOKING KILLS” in a variety of colors had no effect on him.
Something has to be done about this discrimination, he told himself. Cars kill far more people per year than smoking does in an entire decade, but people with cars aren’t hounded and abused like we are. I shouldn’t be turned into a pariah for what I choose to do to MY body. Discrimination is evil! People cannot be looked down upon for the lifestyle choices they make as consenting adults! We won’t….his inner freedom-fighter rant froze as he walked past a fast food restaurant, where an overweight woman was busy assaulting a cheeseburger. The man felt a surge of anger as he watched her devour the cheese and mayonnaise with total disregard for the toll they would take on her physical appearance.
“These fucking fatties are everywhere!” he muttered to himself, walking on. “They should just be sent away to camps and shot!”
-Nilan
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