RachelR’s Recent Comments

• Click here to view comment in original post

  Scapegoating doesn't help

  I find obesity to be a convenient coat hook by which many an environmentalist hangs the perils of a society's obsession with overconsumption.  Lets face it folks, overconsumption can take many forms, and scapegoating fat people as the cause of earthly evil isn't constructive, really.  

  As well, the assumption that fat people are fat because they over consume food, resources, health care, etc... only reveals the depths and limits of your own bigotry.  Do we assume all single black mothers are welfare queens?  Studies have shown that fat people, as a group, eat no differently than their thin counterparts.  Obviously something vastly more complex is at play here than a simplified and rather elementary case of calories in/calories out.  And if fatness were a lifestyle choice, we'd be a nation full of thin people.  

  Americans are getting larger, even though I highly dispute the rates and numbers used in obesity fearmongering.  But what came first?  Obesity or dieting?  The case can also be made that the health hazards commonly and often erroneously attributed to obesity are often due to the effects of dieting, instead.  Often, policies set in place that encourage people to engage in what becomes a cycle of dieting only serve to hurt the very people it purports to help.  

  And Andrew: Put your money where your mouth is.  I'm willing to bet that I, as a overweight vegetarian who shuns processed and commercial food and who eats locally, am doing much more to alleviate climate change than any of my thin meat-eating counterparts - including those who drive a hybrid vehicle.  

  So, where's the national call for vegetarianism?   Oh, right. For much of the same reasons animal rights folk attack women in fur coats and not bikers in leather jackets. It's much safer to attack middle-aged society women than it is to try to splash red paint on a bunch of menacing-looking men sporting chains and tattoos.

  And it's much easier to make fat people - an already socially, economically and politically marginalized group - the target of our attacks than it is to change ourselves.    On The parallels between accepting obesity and ignoring global warming posted 1 year, 10 months ago 71 Responses