The Southern Hole

I don't really think I can consider myself a "smoker", if you bare in mind smokers can't go a day without having a smoke, I actually can...and more than one day to be honest, without a problem. I guess I'm more of a, what we know as, "social smoker", you know, those people who smoke only at parties, clubs or out with friends; and sometimes, rarely really, I have one or two fags when working at home--smoking while editing feels strangely good.

Now, that small pleasure of mine (and many other Mexicans) has been affected by an outrageous raise of the price in cigarettes in Mexico recently, which -on top of it all- came in early than it should have as it was approved to happen only on January 1st, 2011, but oh well, you know people in Mexico do whatever they want...they can raise the prices on anything whenever they feel like it because they just feel like it and nobody will say anything! Why do so, right? It's a "free country" after all. Yes, I am being sarcastic. But that's because it really BOTHERS me that, in this particular case, all the establishments that sell cigarettes can do their will without seeing any consequences or even the attention from the authorities to this matter and, in the end, who always ends up paying is us, the people.



It is very simple really, I mean, you wanna smoke, fine, you go and pay MX$38 (25% more than they used to be!) and you smoke; you don't wanna smoke, you save yourself those MX$38 and you don't smoke...but sometimes, you do wanna smoke but you find extremely unfair how expensive smoking has gotten, and yes, I know that they're doing it for people's "sake" (right!), so they will stop smoking and be healthier and blah, blah, blah...they might have a point there, if only they were really doing it because of that; truth is, they're doing it because they're trying to match the price of tobacco with the price range in the rest of the world, especially Europe and, of course, the US, where a pack of cigarettes costs about US$7, depending on the state.

In general, it's really upsetting seeing how the cost of everything rises up but the salaries don't really go up and when they do, it's an amount to, seriously, laugh about, like last one, they rose only $2.34 to the daily minimum wage, which makes it now an average of $56.00 in the 3 areas in mexico (A, B, and C); so I guess now we know who won't be smoking just because they can't simply afford it...5.7 million Mexicans, which on the other hand, I don't think they really care about, I mean, I believe feeding and sustaining their families must be far more important than having a smoke, of course.



This whole post started up because I was totally upset about the rise on the cigarettes' price but doing some research to sustain what I talk about and all that I bumped into serious numbers and data that just crashes my spirit as a young Mexican, coz it's not only about a stupid thing like cigarettes, it's about everything, gas, electricity, food, all that we humans need to survive and how more than 60% of the Mexico population can't even afford that, it's like having a good nurturing is a luxury here nowadays, which is just SICK considering how much fucking money all the crap politicians make. I know, I'm not discovering anything new or anything like that, and I am definitely not the first person to be upset about it but I really think we NEED to do something soon before they finish dragging Mexico to an even deeper hole. it just pisses me off so much because Mexico is a great country and has amazing potential to be a World Power, but with the people that's currently ruling it...we just won't go very far.