Obesity and transgendered children: exposing the state’s agenda
State rules in favor of young transgender
Maine still fattest state in New England
Gov. John Baldacci recently celebrated the signing of three new state laws aimed at bucking the obesity trend. One requires chain restaurants operating in Maine to prominently post the calorie content of their foods. The other two laws address obesity through Maine schools, one by encouraging the collection of students’ body mass index data to be used for public health research, and the other by encouraging schools to expand physical education programming.
I’m guessing that the number of obese children in Maine far surpasses the number of transgender children in Maine.
On one hand, the state REQUIRES a school to deal with “transgendered” children in a manner the state prescribes. On the other hand, the best they can to address rising trends of obesity is to conduct a study and “encourage” schools to expand physical education.
Here are the results of my study of obesity, conducted with my own two eyes and ears: people spend too much time in front of television screens, computer screens, steering wheels and microwaves, while spending too little time exercising, resting, drinking clean water and eating healthy food.
Here are my recommendations for the Governor and the Legislature next time they feel compelled to address the “obesity” problem:
1. Incorporate daily physical activity for every kid in every school. Tag and dodgeball should not be banned because some kids are slower than others and might lose more often. Learning to be a gracious loser in a competition is good for kids, and might just drive some of them to work harder and improve. Either way, exercise is a necessary component of life and must be learned by children at an early age.
2. Convert some portion of every school into an organic farming operation where kids learn to grow healthy food from seed and how to properly store it at harvest time. Schools are for learning, and what could be more important than learning how to produce and store healthy food? School meals should include ingredients grown at the school and local organic farms to the extent possible, and products grown on huge mega-corporate farms that include heavy doses of hormones, pesticides, and various other chemical additives with unknown health effects should be avoided. Perhaps a scheme could be developed where town’s people paid their “property taxes” in food or labor for the town’s farming operation. (This would be a great way for obese people to burn some calories. If there are labor shortages, welfare recipients and prisoners can supplement the labor force as needed.)
3. Food stamps, WIC and other food assistance programs should prohibit people from buying chips, soda, candy and other garbage “food”. Food assistance programs should require people to purchase products from local organic farms when possible. This would have the added benefit of helping to support Maine farmers, who in turn might just need to hire some additional farm hands (who might be obese people currently on welfare who need a job and a way to burn some calories).
4. Major tax and spending cuts are needed. People are spending too much time working to comply with and fund a burdensome government and as a consequence, we don’t have enough free time to exercise with our children and parents or to prepare healthy food on a regular basis.
Are these ideas that are so revolutionary that our public servants in the Legislature or the Governor’s office may never have heard of them? I doubt it.
Instead, I think that the state has no interest in solving “crises” like “obesity” simply because it drives more and more people into dependency on government, a self-fulfilling solution for bureaucrats who expand their own wealth, power and influence by “working towards solutions” to bigger and bigger problems. Bureacrats who actually solve problems end up unemployed, and thus this cannot be allowed to happen. Rather, the bureaucracy needs to expand by forever finding more and more people who need help.
Unfortunately, too often state “aid” amounts to breaking people’s legs and declaring that only state funded crutches enable them to walk.