Let's start this by owning up to the facts: obesity is a serious epidemic and a complex issue to which society must give serious consideration. It is one of the leading causes of preventable deaths in the United States and other western countries.
We readily admit that in most cases it's caused by a tragic and severe disability. This disability affects the motor skills to such a degree that the individual seemingly
cannot control the motor functions of the hands that stuff food into his or her face.
Or in other words, put down the goddamn hamburger, fatass. You didn't really think we were going to be sympathetic, did you?
The
National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance is an organization that sums up everything wrong with America in 2009. NAAFA states:
"Because being fat can be both a physically and emotionally isolating experience, NAAFA has helped to create and sustain a fat subculture."
It apparently doesn't occur to them that socially deviant behavior and lifestyle choices
should be isolating. If you're a pervert who likes to flash little kids, they plant a sign in your yard so everyone knows that you're a risk to society. Fortunately, morbid obesity is its own yard sign, one that those people get to wear everywhere. The problem is that while most people look at this sign and read "this person is likely to cause an unnecessary burden on public resources" (especially in countries with universal health care),
NAAFA members would have you believe that sign reads "Yeah I'm spilling over into your airplane seat, and proud of it!".
We'll begin with the implied notion that society needs to "accept" people who make the
choice to completely abdicate responsibility for their daily caloric intake. The vast majority of obese people suffer from a lack of self discipline, not glandular/endocrine disorders or psychiatric conditions. Theirs is a disability of
character, and little more. When obesity advocates are confronted with this, the excuses pour out faster than their perspiration on a hot day. Most often cited are the lack of available healthy alternatives in urban areas, busy schedules, or blah blah blah where's the ranch dressing?
We won't bother to dissect the excuses, especially since they almost all boil down to a lack of priorities, laziness, and an infantile sense of entitlement that can only arise in a culture in which the citizens are so pampered comfortable that they could conflate personal negligence with a lifestyle choice.
And we'd be preaching to the choir by doing a line-item, bullet-point list of all the health problems caused by obesity (including how
obese people's brains are deteriorated). If you want to read about them, here's a link to the
Obesity section on the Centers for Disease Control website. Likewise, we won't go into the economic impact obesity has on the world (including how
fat people's cars require more gasoline to haul their weight around).
To anyone with common sense and/or enough self-respect to own up to their faults as being faults, obesity is
not something to be proud of, much less a defining trait of a valid subculture as NAAFA would have you believe.
There are many cultural traits in western society, and the United Sates specifically, that have been subjected to bigotry and harassment. One's race, gender status/sexual orientation, religion (or lack thereof), are all things that either cannot be changed by the individual, or are the product of choices that are protected by fundamental human freedoms. As such, they deserve no scorn save when they are abused in a manner that would cause harm to an
other valid cultural segment of society. Being fat, is not a valid subculture, any more than would be one that centered around people who chose to hit themselves in the face with a hammer several times a day. Self-destruction, where it brushes up against and imposes upon the rest of society,
deserves scorn, contempt, and ultimately, shame.
And it's doubly shameful to try and engineer a "movement" that centers around not only denying the justified, and even righteous wielding of that shame by the healthy members of society but actively lobbying against having
to be subjected to any consequences for imposing on others.
This is NAAFA, in action:
Fuck this, I'm eating a carrot and going for a jog. NAAFA, you are our Douchebag of the Month for October, 2009. I doubt everyone here, myself included, is at their peak physical condition. But unlike you, we actually feel some shame about it and care about improving ourselves.
ignatzami
