Fat Bashers and America Haters

August 20, 2009 No Comments

This was an excerpt from an article from obamaers.com titled “The Politics of Fat”

“Gluttony is a symptom of a a society that places greed and personal gratification above charity and altruism.”

Of course he is referring to American’s.  Besides being a fat basher he also has a very negative opinion about America.

Please give me an example of a nation that places charity and altruism above greed and personal gratification. It’s not a national issue it’s a human nature issue.

I couldn’t agree with him more that people ought to take responsibility for their own actions. But he seems to blame obesity on society while in the same breath saying the individual needs to take more responsibility for their own actions. We can’t blame obesity on society although we can’t deny that we live in a society that is conducive to leisure and self gratification.  We live in a society that has more leisure time and more money to spend (even in this economy) than most nations. But with that being said Mexico is on the heels of America when it comes to the percentage of people who are now considered obese and overweight.  Are we to assume that they too have more leisure time and more money to spend? On top of that I live in a 3rd world country part time and I know for a fact they do not have a lot of money to spend and yet there are plenty of overweight people. So my point is that it’s not a national problem it’s a human nature problem.

So regardless of the source of the problem some want to get government involved because were too stupid and too lazy to do it ourselves. I don’t know about you but that offends me. What we are ultimately talking about here is how we control the actions of others. Should we? I personally don’t think so. Note I am not talking about serious crimes against humanity here.

I am however in favor of education people about proper choices and then let them decide. Although it’s not the complete solution to obesity ,  I don’t think we should go down the slippery slope of complete solutions. After all what’s the trade off for a complete solution and are we willing to pay that price?

A complete solution would mean more government involvement in our day to day lives by telling us more and more what we can or cannot do. Both sides of the argument have valid points but the one who argues for more government actually proposes that we give up freedom in exchange for more control over human behavior.

Let me illustrate how this happens. Let’s say the issue is global warming and whether you believe it or not you might go along with it on the outside chance that it’s true because after all you don’t want to be responsible for destroying the planet. So an unintentional transfer of our freedom happens based on guilt.

Now let’s apply this same technique to smoking…wait America already accomplished that so let’s use our new whipping boy the obese and more specifically child obesity. None of us as a parent would want to be the cause of  bad health in our children so we might just be a little more willing to let go of some of our freedom to save little Johnny. Do you see where I’m going with this?

In my humble opinion if I have a choice between changing obesity or keeping my freedom I would vote for freedom everytime.  Let it hereby be know to all men that I do not belong to the blame America for all the social ills crowd.

Plus Size Politics