Remember how a few years ago, anorexia and bulimia were destroying the lives of America’s youth? Yeah I do too, there was a time when you couldn’t avoid hearing about how female “body image” was being distorted by attractive people on television and in print advertising. Young women, en mass, were apparently racing to the bathroom to puke away a delicious meal or two.
Yes there were and are women, especially some young women, who are being ravished by terrible psychological problems and hard to deal with issues surrounding their self image. For them I feel and hope they seek and find help. There is a difference between a minority of our population suffering from something that needs real assistance and a public relations campaign forged by academics and snake oil salesman creating a media driven sense of epidemic. The craze over people who were too thin was just a craze, not unlike Y2K or Africanized Killer Bees.
Do you know how I always knew there was no mass issue with bulimia and anorexia striking American youth and destroying our nation from the inside? I have eyes and I shop at malls. While the extreme anti-female-left was pushing this notion, I could see with my own eyes that the majority of people around me, including young girls, were getting fatter and fatter. If there was an epidemic of people experiencing extreme weight loss, it sure wasn’t happening outside of JC Penny’s and definitely not Wal-Mart.
You almost never hear about anorexia or bulimia anymore. I believe that is because common sense has set in. In place of extreme weight loss fears, we are now in the midsts of a massive media campaign declaring obesity the number one problem with America. Liberals, out of nowhere, must have found the right prescription glasses, looked around the classroom and realized young girls and the rest of the population were not wasting away, they were gorging themselves on all they could find.
Obesity has become a major concern of the far left. Just as interest groups were birthed and spread throughout the 80′s and 90′s because of the belief the planet was going to get so hot that the world would explode, lefty groups now appear to be on a crusade to tie obesity to the extinction of the human species, the destruction of Health Care and yes, even global warming. Oy, do we not learn our lessons?
I have to say, I could care less about obesity. Will millions die as a result? Sure, but that is not my problem. Millions of people will also die from a plethora of other things. I will never, in my life, jump out of an airplane for recreation. If someone does and they die, not my problem and if a hundred people did it, that still doesn’t make it a concern of the federal government. If people choose to eat until their heart explodes, I don’t really care, that is their right. If they want to spend their money becoming obese, have at it. Liberty isn’t always pretty.
The new argument is that health care costs are spiraling out of control because of obesity. There is endless research making this connection and it became the cornerstone of many of the 2008 candidates health care proposals and will surely be part of the health care solutions coming out of the Congress. That is all well and good, I actually believe health care costs are rising because of obesity and other lifestyle choices. I also know, most of the people pushing the plans and vilifying restaurants and food producers, are fat.
Hillary Clinton’s plan in 2008 was loaded with ideas about how to make America healthy. Hillary Clinton is fat. Hillary actually got fatter during the campaign while she was out talking about her proposals. The woman has millions of dollars and a team of people working on her. She can afford the healthiest food and have someone prepare it for her. She has no problem preaching to others about lifestyle, yet her ass is enormous.
It isn’t just a Democrat thing either. Mike Huckabee LOVES to talk about the weight he lost and the virtues of personal responsibility leading to savings for society. I have news, Mike Huckabee is ENORMOUS again. The guy has a TV show and apparently has decided the money he makes from it is best spent binge eating. If Huckabee wants to talk about how to not stay thin, great, otherwise I have no interest.
They aren’t the only ones. Every other week it seems Oprah does a show about weight loss and has been the public face for this growing media campaign. Oprah is gigantic. A billionaire with all of her money riding on self improvement, she cannot wait to let her audience know they have a problem. She is the one with the problem. Any woman taking diet tips from Oprah needs to have her head examined.
Have you looked at most of the members of Congress pushing Health Care reform? Fat! Michael Moore made a movie about the high cost of health care. He must have run across some of this amazing research linking obesity to the high cost of care. Michael Moore, even with supposedly losing weight, is gigantic.
One of the new trends is to attempt a ban on trans fats and taxes for fatty foods. I honestly think the Oprah’s and Hillary Clinton’s of the world can only be skinny if such a stupid and useless ban or heavy tax existed. It appears to me that to keep Oprah skinny, we would have to remove from the planet, every non-vegetable and fruit and turn our streets into treadmills she could not avoid.
At the end of the day, I don’t care if Hillary Clinton or Oprah or Michael Moore are fat and not giving up a few meals to feed starving people in Uganda. They, however, care that everyone else is. Hypocrites.
If you believe in human evolution, you should recognize that over time, species either adapt or they die. This is supposedly the root of all evolutionary history. If you know how the heart and the human body work, you also know that our great ancestors would have had to face enormous obstacles in conditioning their organs to move out of the oceans and eventually walk on two legs. Pushing against the force of gravity, they managed to become stronger and adapt. Their bodies changed and things worked out.
Our bodies are either going to adapt to being gigantic or die. If human internal organs cannot figure out how to handle a Snickers bar properly over the next few hundred years, we might as well become extinct. Like all things liberals worry about, massive government action is not the answer. Time, nature, and a little common sense will prevail. Healthy doses of shame from skinny good looking people is actually part of the solution too, not the problem.
I believe Liberals were smart to wrap their distaste for a heavier population to the rising cost of health care and not spend their time actually solving their own weight problems. As a conservative, I completely agree with the notion that a lack of personal responsibility is leading to problems in our society. However, if you follow a logical and Constitutional line of thought, you would never arise at government bans, taxes and of course socialized medicine.
The logical thing to do would be to charge people who have excessive weight issues more money for things like health care. Somehow this seems to escape the liberal mind. If everyone enjoys foods with trans fats, but a percentage of the population abuses them, why charge everyone more? Additionally, why make the entire population pay the medical bills that come from this abusive population when the smaller population should be paying less? If obesity is a problem you wish to solve, this line of thought actually makes things worse because it removes consequences from the very obese.
Additionally, giving obese people who are denied or cannot afford the high cost of regular medical insurance a government run medical insurance plan, is counterproductive. The socialist notion that the strong must pay more to save the weak is the problem. Like all liberal plans, their solutions to obesity punishes everyone, to save no one, while hurting the people who make good choices.
In the end obesity will work itself out or it won’t. All of the money and time wasted to hunt this media driven epidemic will only make things worse. Is obesity a problem? Yes, for the obese. Has it become a problem for everyone else? Yes, because we all have to pay for their poor choices. So will a solution whereby everyone is punished and taxed and forced to provide for the obese, solve the problem? No, it will only make things worse.
There is one solution to obesity, eat less and work out more and society cannot do that for the obese.
Comments