Hat tip to Big Fat Deal
Why they let people like John Ridley blog at Huffpo, I have no idea but it’s making me reassess reading Huffpo. What we have here is is raw hatred:
I can’t change my race or my gender. Despite my best efforts and millions of dollars spent trying to locate the fountain of youth, I just keep getting older. Yet, same as millions of Americans I can moderate the number of Big Macs I shove in my pie-hole.
But in the Everybody-Give-Me-A-Hug victim culture in which we live, the obese want a spot at the table along with those who face discrimination based on the way that God or Nature or our Intelligent Designer created us.
For the vast majority of those who are obese — those with a Body Mass Index over 30 — their size is their choice. They choose to take in more calories than they burn. They choose to take in high fat calories over low-fat ones. They choose to fad diet, if they choose to diet at all. They choose to go back to their poor eating habits when those diets failed rather than get down to the hard chore of eating right and exercising.
That’s not meant to abase the obese. I don’t advocate ridicule (mostly). Obesity in America is a serious issue. The affects of which, like smokers with secondhand smoke, are felt beyond the individual offender. According to the Center for Disease Control “a study of national costs attributed to both overweight (BMI 25-29.9) and obesity (BMI greater than 30) medical expenses accounted for 9.1 percent of total U.S. medical expenditures in 1998 and may have reached as high as $78.5 billion ($92.6 billion in 2002 dollars).”
The heavy get heavier, and you and I pay for it.
But if they choose to get big, if they choose to bilk us, why in the world would we choose to mollycoddle with laws which encourage the obese to continue to both live an unhealthy lifestyle and stick us with the bill?
There is no reason.
I remarked to a friend recently that eventually what the lifestyle nazis in America would do would be to have a mandatory weigh in every year for all Americans who would then be fined a certain amount for every percentage above their ideal BMI.
And it would not only be legal but encouraged to publicly shame, humiliate and discriminate against anyone even remotely perceived as overweight.
Of course I had to reply to this story with my usual vitriol:
(oh, it’s not appearing yet at Huffpo! Maybe it was judged too vitriolic!)
I love living in a country where we so desperately need to look down on SOMEONE, ANYONE so we can feel better about ourselves. Shaming and discriminating against someone seems to be our second national sport next to warmaking. Now that people can’t overtly discriminate against blacks, Jews and a host of other people, we have the FATTIES! And it’s OK because THEY did it to themselves! Super! Get the hate machine cranked up for the public ridicule that seems to excite people so in our society. And the ignorant, hateful, prejudicial comments of this hateful story only back that up. We love to hate, we hate to love. God bless the USA. posted 04/09/2008 at 20:39:14
I expect some hateful incoming. And yeah, I’ll love it.
