Mini lessons in prejudice and understanding

I approached the bus stop and found a big fat guy smoking a cigar, stinking up the whole place, despite the clear signs saying no smoking in the bus shelter and the fact that other people have to stand there and breathe it in order to catch the bus. Maybe he had a family who would someday be mourning his death of lung cancer. Maybe he would soak up hundreds of thousands of dollars in taxpayer money or money from his fellow employees’ health premiums with many years of health problems. How could he? But he struck up a conversation with me, he began telling me his life story in fact. And he mentioned that when he was younger his house caught on fire and his sister died in it. So, his psychiatrist, a person in authority, prescribed smoking as a behavioral therapy. The psychiatrist thought that he needed to do something involving sparks and flame every day in order to overcome his post-traumatic symptoms. It was a decent idea, in line with standard treatment of phobias through systematic desensitization. But it doomed the man to a lifetime of smoking. It is just another mini-lesson in prejudice for me. Before I go thinking, "This asshole needs to stop breathing his smoke in my face, and quit," "We all pay the price" of tobacco use, and so on, I should think of the many ways in which a person is pushed and pulled around by forces and people they cannot control, some of them malevolent and some benign, and some people, like the psychiatrist, whose good intentions brought on consequences they did not foresee.