I’m sorry but the Angry Thread simply wasn’t big enough for this. I have today for the first time gone into a bar since the non-smoking laws have been enforced in England, and I have almost never been so f**king angry and frustrated in my entire life. As I realised I had to go and stand outside the front door to have a cigarette with my pint, some large feller and his stick of girlfriend actually laughed at me. At first I thought I’d got something in my teeth or I’d put my trousers on backwards, but no no, I, along with several other people stood outside to have a fag, were being ridiculed and laughed at for being smokers. I’ve been pissed off about the smoking ban since I first heard about the idea. I can accept that smoking is: • Bad for health • Considered by some to be unsociable • Something people shouldn’t have to put up with if they don’t want to • And can sometimes be unpleasant. I’ve worked in a pub for over a year now and have never seen a problem or heard of anyone even raising their voices in anger over someone smoking near them. Perhaps they didn’t want to complain because stereotypically all smokers are drug addicts having an easy night or pimps with a 9mm in their jackets, whatever, there have always been smoking areas and non-smoking areas in pubs. When someone lit up in a non-smoking area, others often calmly and rationally pointed out their error and the smoker would oblige and relocate. If someone brought a child in, they were allowed to sit only in the non-smoking area, and never at the bar, which was no smoking anyway out of respect for staff who were non-smokers. We even had staff rotations of people who had to take food into particularly smoky areas. For f**k sake, everyone was existing together perfectly happily. This guy laughing at me today, for some reason, got right under my skin, and I decided to ask him what was so funny as I came back in. His response was something along the lines of, “Don’t you know that’s not cool anymore?” before turning and chuckling to his insect in a blonde wig as though he’d just said the funniest thing ever. I have never, EVER wanted to drag someone across a table so badly and just hurt them. The actual desire and intention to cause physical harm to this man was remarkably overwhelming. However, having never been in a serious fight before outside of family punch ups with my brother, and having some form of self control left, I let it lie, went to the bar, got another pint, and stood there fuming. As I was sitting in my little cauldron of hate, someone beside me started talking animatedly to the bartender about how wonderful it was that there was not smoke in the air. “It’s so nice now without all them bloody kids puffing smoke in our faces,” this elderly woman was saying. At this point I just gave up and decided to leave. People seemed openly pleased that a vast majority of the populations freedoms were being trampled on, and worse, that that these people were now being stereotyped. On the way out dickhead and stick insect thought it was worth having one more jab. “Going out for another fag, FAG?” and smirked wildly at his ability to mix homophones and homophobia in one sentence. My next actions were incredibly uncharacteristic of me and quite irrational, but I was angry and really couldn’t have given any less of a damn. “Now look f**khead, if you didn’t like smoking in the first place, no-ones making you come into the f**king pub with us now are they?” By the end of that sentence I was shouting and probably making a bit of a fool of myself in other people eyes, but I simply didn’t care. I walked off leaving the bloke and his woman to shake their heads and titter over their Smirnoff Ice’s, they having clearly come away with the upper hand. Why am I telling you this story, because god damn than fat b*****d and his pathetic excuse for a skeleton of a girlfriend were right. They were f**king right. Smoking isn’t cool anymore. Just like illicit drugs suddenly weren’t cool 70 or so years ago, or hunting last year. And at my best guess, alcohol, meat, sex, swearing and whole bunch of other stuff will all be deemed uncool by people in government positions in roughly the next 100 years. I don’t even want to think about trials getting this kind of treatment. Because weather you like it or not, EVERYONE on this forum knows exactly what it feels like being unfairly persecuted, and you’re gonna be in the same boat smokers like me are now. Eddie Izzard once said on the subject of the smoking ban in San Francisco, “Yes I notice there is no smoking in your bars, and soon there shall be no alcohol, and then no talking!” amid general applause and laughter, myself included. But he’s right, and if you’ve ever seen films like Equilibrium, where people aren’t allowed to feel anything because that might cause them to hurt someone, or Demolition Man, where everyone lives in a perfect society that is almost totally incapable of dealing with any kind of violent crime, you’ll know exactly what kind of a future we are letting ourselves in for, and make no mistake, this is just the start. We will be repressed to the point of blind servitude, existing simply to keep existing, and with all the more idiots like those people I saw in the pub today who are already blindly agreeing, who can’t see that they’ve not only stepped up to the scaffold, they’ve put their own heads in the noose. And you will ask me why this is so, and why the government would want to do this. And I answer: Because we MUST be the best. The United Kingdom is one of the few nations on the planet (it may well be the only one) to have another name containing a positive adjective: Great Britain. This idea that the UK must be strong and great again has lead to us bending over backwards and sacrificing almost everything we have in the manic, screaming pursuit of creating this perfect society: • One that stands tough against the forces of evil (Iraq, Afghanistan) • One that helps out Allies in doing so (America) • Where everyone is clean living and healthy • And where all people are welcome The thing is though, that list can be written out differently. • Stands tough against poor helpless people who can’t even fend off their own ruthless dictators, and whose natural resources are the only thing they have left to bargain with • Gangs up with equally narrow minded bullies in order to steal said resources from aforementioned poor people. • Where everyone has no freedom to do anything but has been indoctrinated to do so without caring. • Where f**kers from every corner of the globe can come to exploit us for the dumb suckers we are. And in case you all hadn’t noticed, that last bit, that is exactly what we are. Britain is far from Great anymore. We are a global f**king laughing stock. People from all over the world know that they can simply drop everything and be welcomed here. And for the few that do come here and who work hard and keep their heads down, I’ve not got a problem with that. Its people who come here and, having had the red carpet laid out, start ordering room service and trashing the hotel room. I’ve heard of women in schools, complaining that other women were offending them because they did not have their faces covered. Or demanding that various British playground games such as tic, tac, toe and hopscotch, were too British and should be replaced with something more globally cultural. Let us not forget the July 7th bombings (I’m not going to mention 9/11 or Oklahoma except to say that I have nothing but contempt for Americans and if it hadn’t been innocent people I’d have been glad). Want to hear some other crazy facts about our so called Great Britain? Ok Kids, well lets begin! • Prison wardens were told that they were not allowed to make toast in the mornings in their dingy little kitchens, because the smell of it might offend the inmates, who lounge around wearing whatever they want sitting in front of plasma screens in what is effectively their own private youth club. How compassionate… • Tax payers money is used to fund the expensive and fast cars you see government officials like Tony Blair and Gordon Brown being driven around in, which are so fast because according to government expenditure, they are required in case the must out-manoeuvre and escape terrorists who might be chasing them. Smart use of my hard buck. • And the average Medical practitioner, who earns say £80,000 a year and helping sick people everyday, earns approximately 340 times less, than a man who kicks a football around a field. Fair and just. But that is all besides the point. The point is, as many of the sharper ones will have noticed, that all this is circular. Much in same way that in the future we will exist simply to continue existing, so these people come from overseas to cause terror on us because we have stolen from them. In our rush to be the greatest and most powerful yet compassionate at the same time, we have fallen on our own swords. And again why? Because we have seemingly all gone totally insane and decided to LET people stab us again whilst we are down, by giving in to every little thing that these people want. A very good friend of mine, who perhaps smokes a little too much weed for his own good, remarked that the only people you can get away with being racist to these days is us. White people. English people. I am: • White • A smoker • Bisexual • A trials rider • Tattooed and pierced Almost all of this list now offends, sickens or angers 90% of the population of this country, this apparent land of the free. No protection whatsoever is offered by our so called government, our so called leaders chosen from among us. These people who are supposed to represent the English public have less in common with us than we do with people who live in other damn countries. Our values and morality, the way we refer to our pride of being British is being torn away from us in this b*****d desire between progression and domination. And what is worse, we are not even progressing towards anything good. Upton Sinclair, one of the great American novelists, was quoted stating, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it." Former US Presidential candidate Al Gore recently appeared in a film called An Inconvenient Truth, where he put forward the thought: “Future generations may well have occasion to ask themselves, "What were our parents thinking? Why didn't they wake up when they had a chance?" We have to hear that question from them, now.” These men are talking about not only global warming that was the subject matter of An Inconvenient Truth, but the way in which we THINK we’re looking at the bigger picture, but are in fact only looking at a big piece of an enormous picture through a relatively small hole. Climatologists and related officials have come up with calculations as to the effect of global warming and other environmental detriments, and the results are frankly terrifying. With a 6 degree increase in global temperature, which we are fast heading towards, the planet will almost no longer be able to sustain human life. The O-zone layer will simply not protect humans anymore against UV light. People won’t have to worry about skin cancer because they won’t have any skin to get cancer of. This kind of change will prompt radical and terrifying changes in meteorological patterns, causing giant “super-storms” of which the likes of Hurricane Katrina were only a warm up, and that the film The Day After Tomorrow so accurately represented. The planet will then effectively begin to fight back; fissures in the earth bordering the tectonic plates that create the crust of the earths surface will begin to shift uncontrollably and massive fireballs the size of cities will be vented through these seems out of the wildly unstable core and mantle of the planet. Anyone still alive after this will be subject to a nuclear fallout approximately 1 billion times that of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as the Earth begins to vent any leftover radiation and effectively, as a planet, dies. Nothing will survive, not even single celled organisms, bacteria or ecological plant life. The very building blocks of a possible new race of ANYTHING will be eradicated. So what does this have, coming back to the original point which is the infringement of humans rights to freedoms like being able to smoke in a pub? The point is that; it doesn’t. We have gone so far along the route of destroying this planet that we have no way of going back. It’s hopeless. Officially hopeless. So we can only hope to enjoy the time we have left. Which we seem utterly intent on not doing, and this is where my frustration is born. In that we KNOW that we have no hope left, yet we futilely struggle on. I was until recently incredibly angry about global warming and the lack of effort people put in to stop it, but I’m refreshingly unbothered about it, as I can see that it is quite simply the easiest way to destroy the greatest disease of all; humanity. As Hugo Weavings character Agent Smith states in the Matrix, “You are not even actually mammals, you are parasites.” And in our attempt to create the great and good society, we have become our own becoming. In this insane world where half is filthy rich and the other half starves itself through its days, where people are kidnapped and sold into slavery through prostitution or other physical debasement, where animals are given absolutely no rights and slaughtered without a thought but you can be sued thousands of pounds for calling someone a funny name, in this mad, mad world, we have all calmly and quietly united in our own demise without even knowing it. And so I ask my own questions: why can we not take what we have and spread it equally? Why cannot we really make poverty history as Bob Geldorf commends us to, and really truthfully share so we may enjoy our last few years alive? Why cannot we have our own simple freedoms back instead of imprisoning those which others deem to have the right to judge as being wrong? I see a world as Tyler Durden describes it in Fight Club; “In the world I see - you are stalking elk through the damp canyon forests around the ruins of Rockefeller Center. You'll wear leather clothes that will last you the rest of your life. You'll climb the wrist-thick kudzu vines that wrap the Sears Tower. And when you look down, you'll see tiny figures pounding corn, laying strips of venison on the empty car pool lane of some abandoned superhighway.” In this world we can actually, all, for once, be free. We can all live together, in some form of harmony, and be free. And you know, maybe I was wrong and we might then, in the world where we have forsaken Top Gear, Wetherspoons and Durex, where we leave behind Penicillin, Sony and Smirnoff, where we forsake absolutely everything and choose to make our own freedoms, maybe the planet just might survive. Wouldn’t that be wonderful? You have probably just read this and formed your conclusions that I am insane. You would be, in the broadest sense of the term; correct. 2 months ago I had a nervous breakdown which rapidly in a matter of minutes became a full on psychotic episode, a very real waking nightmare, which manifested itself in the form of a bottle of wine, a pack of painkillers, and a very sharp knife. So yes, you’re right, I am in some sense insane, and have always had difficulties dealing with the world we live in, and the beliefs I have listed above are very much ones close to my heart. I feel I simply wanted to get it off my chest, and tomorrow will probably feel totally unbothered by it again. But oh well everyone, enjoy the end of all things to come. Rich Acknowledgements: Imdb.com, ESRC wages and distribution of wealth database, wikipedia.com.
