Smokers' Solidarity

When COVID-19 landed with a bang in 2020, we had to power down on a lot of things because we were on lockdown. Not smokers. I used to have fun seeing them bonding with each other. Imagine this, cigarette in the mouth, blue mask under the chin, puff puff puff, pull up the mask and go back into some building.

Smokers are arguably the only group of people not affected by the cellphone mono-culture. They still talk to each other, as they inhale and puff outside because they are not welcome in most Canadian and American buildings.

You are reading this blog and not talking to the person next to you in the car, at home, road construction site, conference or drugstore. Not smokers. Solidarity is tight. They discuss the road to extinction, which is obvious in many ways.

Enemy #1 is the government. They don’t look forward to annual budgets from provincial governments because they know cigarette tax goes up annually. It is called the ‘sin tax.’

Enemy #2 is the health system that is pro-lungs, saying smoking is bad news for lungs.  Enemy #3 is the imminent danger staring them in the face: NO SMOKING signs, which could be in the metric system or imperial system (meters or feet). 

That is why most smokers carry industrial measuring tape in their smoking kits to measure how far away from the building they should smoke. There is no uniform distance. Some buildings say ten feet, others 20 meters.

Smokers have so much to talk about, including people who sneer at them. 

By:  Nonqaba waka Msimang.