Sometimes it's just too damn much

Fatty-Fatty Two-by-Four
couldn’t get through the bathroom door.
So she did it on the floor.

This verse was followed by much back-slapping merriment and giggling by mean schoolboys after it had been directed humiliatingly at some poor oversized girl back in my schoolyard days.

You could get away with calling attention to somebody’s adiposity back in those days and not suffer much more than a frown from a teacher. It was kind of an insult to refer to somebody as “fat” back then, but not a serious insult. After all, if the kid (or adult, for that matter) was fat, that was what he or she was.

Reference to bigness was even used, almost affectionately in nicknames, like Fats Domino and Fats Waller. I went through school with a porky kid who was called “Tubby”. Everybody called him that, even teachers, even himself. No insult intended. He was, after all, tubby. And, there simply weren’t that many fat kids in those days. I can look at my class photos and see a plethora of youngsters who are lean to the degree that some of them seem to have come out of European refugee camps post World War Two. So, the Tubbies of the group stood out.

A friend and I were having coffee one morning and a family walked by the bistro. The family consisted of two highly obese parents, and three dangerously overweight kids. All of them were sucking on slurpies.

“Those parents should be charged with child abuse,” my friend said. “I don’t see any difference between that behavior than if all four of them were smoking cigarettes, with the kids having the butts supplied by the parents.”

I took his point.

My wife attended a session yesterday to upgrade her first-aid status for the workplace. In conversation afterwards the EMT mentioned the huge increase in incidents of folks collapsing due to diabetic shock. Big demand on the ambulance service, she said.

“It’s because so many people are so overweight,” was her considered opinion. “Type 2 diabetes has just soared.

The medical community would agree with her.

And since there is a genetic component with Type 2, there is a possibility of the gene multiplying in exponential fashion. We could, theoretically produce a generation in which diabetes is the norm. Along with other things that are scary for the human race, this could be a further one.

What must be considered in this regard is that overweight – other than very rare clinical exceptions – is a matter of lifestyle choice, like smoking or drinking too much. It can be controlled if we have the will to do so.

We live in a society that has become motivated by greed. The stock market meltdown can attest to that. We all want more-more-more, even when we can’t afford it. This applies to governments, the corporate world, the homeowner (or purchaser) and the consumer. And it applies to the person who eats.

I can go to my supermarket or a 7-11 and can watch kids buy masses of crap and hand the clerk folding money for that same crap. Where did they get the money? From their parents, of course. If I’d had the money given to me when I was a kid, I’d have bought crap, too. But, I didn’t have the money. Not that we were poor by the standards of that day, it was just that my parents didn’t hand out money. If a kid got an allowance, it was for a minuscule amount.

To deal with the onslaught of juvenile obesity and its health consequences, many schools have outlawed vending machines that sell crap. Good for them. Though there is nothing to stop the kid going to the corner store and buying that same crap-crap-crap.

I have no answer for this other than the recessionary times in which we live are going to force a lot of people to reappraise their spending priorities.

Or maybe we should go back to insult. Bring back Fatty-Fatty Two by Four and see if the humiliation might work. It’s a modest proposal but it beats stomach-stapling, in my esteem.