HERE'S MARK STEYN'S TAKE ON OUR OBESE WORLD
(Headings are mine)
TOO FAT TO MOVE
But, if you're not on welfare, or working in the welfare office, or working for a "green solutions" business that's landed the government contract for printing the recycled envelopes in which the welfare checks are mailed out, or the trial lawyers behind the class action suit after the green-friendly recycled latex gloves cause mass Chlamydia outbreaks at Newark, O'Hare, and LAX, it's not an attractive society to be in. It's not a place to run a small business-a feed store or a plumbing company or anything innovative, all of which will be taxed and regulated into supporting the state sector. After all, what does it matter to them if your business goes under? Either you'll join the government workforce, or you'll go on the dole. So you too will become part of the dependent class, or the class that's dependent upon the dependent class. Whichever it is, Big Government wins.
CONTROL CONSUMPTION
We're told that America's and the world's economy depends on "consumption." Hence, the efforts of the government and the Federal Reserve to stampede recalcitrant consumers back into the malls. But consumption is a manifestation of an economy, not the cause of it. In order for something to be consumed, it first has to be produced - which is why healthy societies make wealth before consuming it. Big Government prefers to "stimulate" the public into consuming because it's easier than stimulating them into producing. But the latter is what matters.
WHAT WE DO
What happens when you consume without producing? You can see it on any American Main Street, whose very inhabitants would startle a timetraveler from 1890 long before he noticed any of the technological marvels. A time-traveler from 1950 might have a more specific reaction: back in those days, a signature image of sci-fi movies and comic books was the enlarged brain, the lightbulb cranium with which a more evolved humanity would soon be wandering around. Evolvo Lad had one in his tussles with Superboy. So did Superman's sidekick in a futuristic fantasy called "The Super-Brain of Jimmy Olsen." With his super-intelligent brain, Jimmy has me at his mercy!" gasps Superman. But Clark Kent's gal pal felt differently about her colossal noggin when it showed up in "Lois Lane's Super-Brain." "The evolution ray that made me super-intelligent turned me into a freak!" she sobs, clutching her unsightly Edisonian incandescent of a head.
There's good news and bad news, Lois. As any visitor from the Fifties would soon discover, in a bleak comment on the limits of predictive fiction, our brains didn't get bigger. But our butts did. If DC Comics had gone with "The Super-Ass of Jimmy Olsen," they'd have been up there with Nostradamus. "Our culture's sedentary character - our strong preference for watching over doing, for virtual over real action - seems closely correlated to our changing physical shape," wrote the Harvard historian Niall Ferguson. "We now consume significantly more fats and carbohydrates than we actually need. According to the standard measure of obesity, the body-mass index, the percentage of Americans classified as obese nearly doubled, from 12 percent to 21 percent, between 1991 and 2001. Nearly two-thirds of all American men are officially considered overweight, and nearly threequarters of those between 45 and 64. Only Western Samoans and Kuwaitis are fatter. We are our own walking (or waddling) metaphor for consumption unmoored from production.
IN THE USA AND BRITAIN AND CANADA
Dependistan is an unhealthy land. In America, obesity starts earlier and earlier: it's doubled since 1980. According to some surveys, a third of all children over two are obese Libertarians instinctively recoil from a nanny state that presumes to lecture you on eating your vegetables, and red-state conservatives have a natural cultural antipathy to effete, emaciated coastal metrosexuals nibbling their organic endives - and that was before Michelle Obama decided to make an anti-obesity crusade the centerpiece of her time as First Lady. They're not wrong to be suspicious. Almost all public health behavioral campaigns end up as either bullying or brain-dead or both: half a century ago, nobody thought smokers would wind up huddled on the sidewalk outside windswept office buildings. Few foresaw that high-school "zero tolerance" policies for drugs would lead to students being punished for having Aspirin in their lockers. In 2008, a bill in the British House of Commons attempted to ban Tony the Tiger, longtime pitchman for Frosties, from children's TV because of his malign influence on young persons. Why not just ban Frosties? Or permit it by prescription only? Or make kids stand outside on the sidewalk to eat it? Already, San Francisco's city council has voted against life, liberty, and the pursuit of Happy Meals by attempting to criminalize fast-food menu items that offer free children's toys. It's not far-fetched to imagine government attempting to alter the contents of our stomachs: in fact, they already do. The Public Health Agency of Canada requires that white flour, enriched pasta, and cornmeal be augmented by folic acid to help women lessen the risk of neural-tube defects in their babies. It's also not far-fetched to predict the usual unforeseen consequences: a Norwegian study published in "The American Journal of Medicine" found that folic-acid fortification could increase your risk of cancer. Oh, well.
WHAT'S NEEDED
Our "changing physical shape" (in Ferguson's words) seems an almost literal rebuke to the notion of republican self-government. Never mind the constitution, where are our checks and balances?
What might restore the unprecedented size of contemporary Americans to something closer to mid-twentieth-century Americans? The family meal, with mom, dad, and the kids all'round the kitchen table, like The Partridge Family or The Brady Bunch? More competitive sports at school? A paper round? "Social media" novelties that don't require you to sit on your butt and look at a screen all day? A summer of farm work before six years of Fat Studies at George Mason University?
BUT IT SEEMS IT AIN'T GOING TO HAPPEN
WHAT SHOULD HAPPEN
None of these things is going to happen. So instead we're left with Mrs. Obama as Marie Antoinette for an age of PC Bourbons: "Don't let them eat cake." What will that do? Push the percentage of obese kids up to 60 percent? Seventy? Senator Richard Lugar, one of the GOP's Emirs of Incumbistan, demands more "federal child nutrition programs." But the National School Lunch Act (whose very name nineteenth-century Americans would have regarded as a darkly satirical fancy from dystopian science fiction) dates back to 1946. The bigging up of American schoolchildren happened on Washington's watch. Yet we'll fight the "war on obesity" as we fight the "war on poverty" - with more dependency and more government programs. While we're "fighting" all these phony wars, it's not even clear we could fight the old-fashioned kind anymore: according to the U.S. Army's analysis of national data, 27 percent of Americans aged 17 to 24 are too overweight for military service. Even running for our lives is beyond many of us.
THE TREND SEEMS IT WILL CONTINUE
There is already an almost surreal disconnect between the emaciated sirens of popular culture and those who gather in the dark to watch small stars on the big screen. The largest people on the planet outside the hearty trenchermen of Western Samoa pay ten bucks to watch all-American stories set in all-American towns featuring increasingly un-American boys and girls who bear less and less resemblance to them. It seems likely that trend will continue, and a vast mass of vast mass will sink to the bottom while an ever more cadaverous elite gets all the best jobs. It also seems inevitable that, in response, Big Nanny will decide that she's the one who needs to get bigger and bigger, and to micro-regulate her 350 to 400 million charges ever more coercively. It's not such a leap to imagine the GAUNT Act (Government Assistance for Universal Nutritional Transformation) passing Congress circa 2020 to lessen strains on health-care costs. It won't work. You can't reduce the citizen's waist through government waste - not absent anything this side of a nationwide famine. But it won't stop the statists trying.
The landscape will adjust to accommodate: there will be more class action suits, and your local multiplex and car manufacturers and discount airlines will change their seat configurations every ten, five, two years. This is a cultural phenomenon arising from socio-economic changes that would be difficult to reverse even if our elites accepted the legitimacy of attempting to reverse them.
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ONE OF THE BIGGEST AND SILLIEST EDUCATION NORMS TODAY IN NORTH AMERICA, IS THE ***ONE-TO-TWO-HOURS*** OF HOMEWORK FOR KIDS AFTER SCHOOL, FROM AGE 9 AND UP (MAYBE EVEN YOUNGER). THEY GO TO SCHOOL FOR 7 HOURS OR SO A DAY.....GOODNESS KNOWS WHAT THEY ARE DOING, BUT IT SEEMS THE TEACHERS THINK THEY NEED HOMEWORK EACH NIGHT FOR 5 NIGHTS, AND MAYBE SOME OVER THE WEEK-END ALSO.
Now when I was going to school from 1947 to 1959 WE NEVER HAD HOME WORK (this was in England) - WE DID OUR SCHOOL WORK ***IN SCHOOL*** and we just studied for exams when it was exam time!!
Sooooo.....we not only had "play-breaks" in school (morning, lunch, and afternoon breaks) to LITERALLY go out in the school-yard and PLAY!! We also had EVERY EVENING AND WEEK-END ***TO DO OUR OWN THING***!!!
AND WHAT DID WE KIDS OF 8,9,10? Well we had time for SOCCER, CRICKET, HOP-SCOTCH, JUMPING OVER THE SPINNING-ROPE, PLAYING HIDE-GO-SEEK, AND JUST LOTS OF EXERCISE PERIOD!!
Now I'll tell you about a fun hide-and-seek game we boys and girls did, yes at age, 8,9,10.....we boys would count to 100 and the girls would go and hide, then we'd go find them, and on finding them we'd give them a kiss!!!
Oh...boy...that's shocking some of you parents, right, probably so. At that age we boys and girls knew NOTHING about sex, we had no sex-hormones running through our blood. BUT, we sure knew a nice kiss was nice, and the girls thought so also. It was completely harmless. Now some of you are probably saying, "Oh but such would lead to young sexual habits when the hormones kicked in."
NOPE, just not so, been there, I've done it, not so at all. The MORALS in the 1950s in Britain was EXTREMELY HIGH. Boys knew the girls would NOT accept anything more than a kiss. Been there folks, seen it folks. If a boy went to touch a girl's breast his hand was removed very quickly. Girls (and there was only ever one or two in my High-school) who let boys go further than a kiss were looked upon as "loose" and "immoral" and not a good girl.
So us boys and girls playing at age 8,9,10, hide-and-seek and kiss the girls when found, DID NOT LEAD to sexual immorality as teens.
It was in the 1960s when the 60s sexual revolution STARTED with the back-ground of dugs and just a society letting loose on morals began. I finished High School in 1959 and I can tell you in my graduation class all the girls were still virgins. I know because us boys talk .... any girl that had allowed a boy to have intercourse with her.... well it would have been sounded loud and clear among all us boys.
Well back to the main topic......kids need to stop watch TV as much as they do, stop playing sit-down games on the computer as much as they do....AND GET UP AND GET OUT AND PLAY!!
YOU PARENTS HAVE TO GUIDE AND OVERSEE THEM IN THIS MATTER. GET THEM INTO A KARATE CLUB, THE BOY-SCOUTS, GIRL-GUIDES, ATHLETIC PROGRAM, SWIMMING, BALL GAMES WHERE YOU HAVE TO RUN AROUND.
YOU PARENTS HAVE TO TEACH THEM RIGHT AND CORRECT EATING HABITS OF GOOD FOODS, AND AWAY FROM THE FAST-FOODS AND TRASH SO-CALLED FOODS OUT THERE. SAME WITH LIQUIDS.
WE HAVE AN OBESE WORLD, SOCIETY; TIME FOR YOU TO GET OFF YOUR DUFF AND DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT, FOR YOU AND YOUR WHOLE FAMILY.
NOW WHAT STEYN AND MYSELF HAVE SAID IS NOT MEANT TO OFFEND THOSE WHO HAVE GLANDULAR PROBLEMS - LEGITIMATE WEIGHT PROBLEMS BECAUSE OF SOMETHING NOT BEING CORRECT WITH YOUR BODY CHEMISTRY.
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