Passive smoking was the excuse for alienating smokers originally.
While health professionals must concede there is minimal danger of passively contracting contagious diabetes or waistline expansion when trapped in confined spaces with corpulent diners tucking into cream buns, triple cheeseburgers, sausage rolls, chocolate bars and fizzy drinks, it does not mean the fat will avoid exile and exploitation.
Smoking bans have already extended to open spaces where there are zilch chances of innocent bystanders (if such exemplary persons exist) catching lovely passive whiffs, let alone the cancers, heart disease and mortality conveniently linked with smoking by contemporary health professionals who prefer to blame victims in the absence of miracle cures; much as freedom fighters are billed popularly as terrorists "linked with al-Qaeda" by those wielding the politics of demonisation for power and profit.
The very sight of smoking has become offensive. Children gaze in terror. Taught that smoking kills, they stare, transfixed, at hapless smokers expecting them to drop dead on the spot, because somehow, the fact that the statistical association of smoking with fatality is not always instant, was omitted from the propaganda.
Expect fat people to be shunned. Their existence is a shameful blot on the community. Already a majority of sadly brainwashed primary school children interviewed in a recent study reported they'd rather be blind than fat.
Once vilification is complete, handy scapegoats who fail to conform are fair game to be taxed into oblivion by otherwise economically challenged governments.
Taxes on sugar and fat, on the pretext that obesity constitutes a disproportionate drain on health funding, will follow.
The strategy has worked terrifically well with tobacco. Surviving smokers would rather die than endure the disapproval of health professionals, so the heroic tax-take they contribute is, even according to Treasury, now well in excess of any healthcare costs they incur. Further savings on superannuation made by premature deaths - from poverty, pneumonia caught in windy alleyways, isolation and broken hearts - are a bonus.
Of course, for the obese - as it is with smokers and freedom fighters - the campaign will be counterproductive, driving them further into secret solace, via toxic junk food, until they have to be surgically separated from sofas with forklifts; whereas ideally, fresh air, exercise, love, compassion, encouragement and acceptance, would achieve far healthier outcomes than censure.
Slim, compliant non-smokers should not be too smug either.
Now the efficacy of scapegoating is economically quantifiable, other obvious groups could easily feel the lucrative spotlight of social disapproval beaming their way.
Clearly drinkers are the prime upcoming title contenders and, after them, sportspeople (costly self-inflicted injures), farmers (dirty dairying sullying our international image) and the elderly (expensive, wrinkly and slow) will be next in line for extermination.
