The question returns to haunt: How could they have killed her like that?
Next question: How could she have allowed them to kill her? She knew…she knew!
Well. The answer rolls into one: my mother was murdered by the God-damned tobacco industry, whose acolytes got her addicted to nicotine.
Craving, craving, ever craving…she puffed her way to the grave. By the time she died, she was going through two or three packs a day. She couldn’t have stopped, even if she had wanted to — which she did not. Puffety puffety puffety…chugging right into the grave.
A thousand curses on everyone who works in the tobacco industry. More than a thousand curses on any legislator who ever agreed to keep tobacco peddling legal.
They murdered my mother. Every goddamn one of those killers, from the tobacco company employees to the bastards in the legislatures that have kept tobacco legal, every single one of them is a murderer.
They’re all complicit in the murders of the SEVEN MILLION PEOPLE A YEAR. And one of those victims was my mother.
A horrible way to die, the cancer brought on by tobacco smoking. My mother suffered monstrously. So did my father, as he struggled to care for her during her hideous final months and weeks.
He chased me off from her bedroom, as she lay dying: didn’t want me to watch that show. Neither, I expect, did she.
But finally the show did end. She died: in vast pain until the last couple of weeks, when she was mostly unconscious.
It’s hard to understand why her death and the thousands of deaths like hers are not regarded as murder. Actually, the world-wide the toll is far larger than that: eight million murders a year.
Why, my friends, do we tolerate this constant, ongoing mass murder?
Yeah, I know: money.
But money doesn’t make it right. Money doesn’t make it not murder. It just makes the murder even more immoral than it would be if someone weren’t getting rich from it.