A note: I've decided to turn off comments because...well, I just don't feel like having comments or moderating comments. I appreciate all of you who read it (all five of you), but not having access to moderating said comments during the day and refusing to not moderate doesn't engender much of a conversation beyond "that was good" or "fuck, you fucking suck" or whatever. So I'm shuttin' 'em down.
Anyway. So I was reading the glorious Fat Chat and Fatosphere feed, waiting for someone to pick up on a little news blurb I'd caught on the elevator whilst at work. The elevators in the office building I work at has these screens that show news and sports scores and ads, and one of the news blurbs was about how First Lady Michelle Obama was saying that childhood obesity was negatively affecting the economy. Hmmm. Now, being a fat that has, apparently, helped to cause terrorism and is killing the planet (not kidding about those - people have publicly said that), I was curious to find out how fat kids could possibly be causing the economy to tank. The feeds came through for me as I discovered this is what came flying out of her mouth at the National League of Cities conference:
"Childhood obesity is affecting your workforces too – obese children are less healthy and miss more school on average,” leading to more parental tardiness and absenteeism at businesses in their communities, she said. “When we talk about childhood obesity we are talking about the workforce you are trying to build, businesses you are trying to attract, budgets you are trying to balance everyday,” Obama said warning that businesses may be reluctant to invest and build in communities with an unhealthy future workforce. (from CNN)
Now, given that absolutely no sources or studies or anything was cited by Mrs. Obama in that little spurt of speechifying, I'm inclined to call GIGANTIC HORSESHIT. Have a gander at Paul Campos' latest over at the Daily Beast, where actual studies and whatnot show that in fact, GIGANTIC HORSESHIT.
Let me tell you some stories and yes, it's anecdotal, but perhaps it might shed some light on why fat kids miss more school on average - and it's not because us fat kids were sickly.
From first grade until eight grade, I was saddled with gym teachers who were, on a good day, complete assholes. As a kid in elementary school, I was mocked and made fun of more by a grown man than any of my peers. I went to other adults explaining the problem and...absolutely nothing was done. In sixth grade, my teacher told another teacher of mine that I was "crazy". I was shuffled off to a social worker who knew that all that ailed me was my fat and gave me diet books. In junior high, my gym teacher was determined to save me from myself or whatever, and demanded weekly weigh-ins and for me to keep a food diary. Thankfully, my mother shut that shit down right quick, and in my eighth grade yearbook, my gym teacher wrote something along the lines of "exercise is fun!". But thanks to her and to the douchebag fuckface elementary school teacher, exercise wasn't fun, it was torture. It was punishment for not being particularly good at games like softball or kickball, for not doing 25 sit-ups in 30 seconds for the Presidential Physical Fitness test, for not being able to do a chin-up. I didn't like school very much and if I could weasel my way out of going, you bet your ass I did. Did my mom miss work because of it? Hell no. We were still in the glory days of being able to be left alone in the house at a reasonable age.
In my freshman year of high school, my entire homeroom decided that I was the fat ass they were going to pick on. Signs on my back, tacks on my chair - did they get their bullying handbook from the 1950s? A boy told me he'd kill himself if he were me. Do you really think I was leaping out of bed every morning, eager to go to school to learn? The only bright spot was that my mom was smart enough to get me excused from gym for three years straight because she'd seen the kind of psychological toll dealing with COMPLETELY HORRIBLE ADULTS had caused, and she wasn't about to force me to endure any more of it. I consider myself lucky, though. I really do. I got lucky and found my feet and my people in theater and radio, and I could escape the crapweasels from sophomore year on thanks to having homeroom in the school radio station. And what's so darkly amusing to me is that these same fellow students that took such delight in shitting upon me from a great height were the same fellow students who voted me "Most Original" my senior year and signed my yearbook and danced in a circle with me at prom.
I do think that the overall concept of "Let's Move" is a decent one. Like, the notion that everyone should have access to good eats and safe spaces in which to play and run about and whatever - I can't quibble with that because everyone should. But instead, it's morphed into this bizarro fat-shaming festival that targets fat kids and ostracizes them even more than they already are and makes it clear that they're a problem to be solved, something to be fixed. There's no acknowledgment of how eating disorders are turning up in younger and younger kids, no mention of how soul-chilling it is that four- and five-year-olds are talking about dieting, no thought given to how something like "Let's Move" is ultimately doomed to fail because thinness is its only marker of success.
Every day, I'm more and more grateful that I grew up when I did because chances are had there been the same kind of almost inescapable pressure being put on fat kids to do whatever it takes to stop being fat when I was a fat kid, I very well may have done what that shitty classmate of mine freshman year thought I should do. Aren't we supposed to be smarter than this?
