People

5 thoughts on “People”

1. Young people used to be so thin! Your photos make me realize how much heavier the population has become over the years.

   Also, I want those curtains.

2. Yes! And every day I see waddling down the street the sorts of behemoths that just two generations ago would have been sideshow rarities. No amount of Obamacare or Romneycare or free market free-for-all can save such persons from themselves. Health care is a fast-growing industry because all this country makes anymore are fat people. Sometimes when I see one–or two or three together, as they’re coming more and more to travel in herds–I think in my dark-minded way, what torches they would make in the ovens, what with all that fat.

   (The curtains? What about the velvet painting of the poodle?)

3. Hold the poodle painting, but if you’ve got a paint-by-number masterpiece, I’m your girl.

   A friend of mine used to date a guy whose daughter was seriously obese. The child was about ten and probably weighed more than I did. One of the things that broke up the relationship was that my friend couldn’t see having children with a man who wasn’t looking after his daughter’s health. She called it child abuse. I thought that was a harsh judgement at the time, but after seeing the rates of diabetes, heart and liver disease in obese children, I’ve come closer to understanding that point of view. The poor kid is set up for a lifetime of being in her own way. It’s irresponsible parenting.

   Oddly, the guy is a cardiologist, and his wife, the girl’s mother, is a pediatrician. Clearly they ought to know better.

4. Some serious disconnect there on the part of the parents; “cognitive dissonance,” I guess is what it’s called.

   And it does seem to be child abuse. Children depend on us to guide them rightly to their own adulthoods.

   But in this country, this poor, forsaken country, we scarcely seem to know any longer what a child is, or at and until what ages young people need to be afforded more protection and control and guidance. We bring twelve-year-olds up on murder charges. There is no sphere in which a person that young is allowed adult privileges; how can we be charging them with adult offenses? And we now have police in our schools arresting six-year-olds and putting them in handcuffs. We have gone mad. (Look at the Republican Party and tell me we have not gone mad.) Police in our grade schools, guns and their usage as common as head colds, metal detectors and closed-circuit cameras everywhere but we’re not one bit safer for that, and through and around it all, millions of people of all ages who have somehow grown so monstrously fat they can barely waddle and breathe, and cannot comprehend any set of instructions more complex than “Tune in tomorrow” or “Put your hands up”–madness on a grand scale.

5. The most frightening thing about the Republican party is its size. I was naive enough to think that the true crackpots were few, and easily spotted due to lack of teeth and that lemony light in their eyes. Truly, I had no idea of the magnitude of the problem until W was elected. And, mind-blowingly, reelected. What a fucking shock that was.

   These things are all symptoms of the same problem: Day-to-day life is not a challenge. The easier it becomes to survive, the sicker we become, intellectually and psychologically. We have gone mad.

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