‘You are now entering the Twilight Zone’
While obesity in children is a concern we should take seriously, I’m not sure we need body-fat police running around the state:
Wendy Hanson, state obesity prevention coordinator for the Department of Health, says what’s needed is enforcing the physical education requirement in the public school system, creating state-wide nutrition standards, and enforcing the school wellness policies, not just monitoring them. Finally, she believes there should be a statewide surveillance program to see how many obese kids there are and what’s being done about them.
It’s fascinating the civil rights we abuse in the name of “public health;” dictating how private business can function through smoking bans and even menu oversight. Now, Minnesota wants to spy on chubby kids.
Let’s be clear. We now live in a country in which politicians will fight to the death to require FISA warrants before allowing surveillance of terrorists’ phone calls or bank accounts, but gleefully throw basic civil rights in the can to keep tabs on our own citizens because they happen to be on the hefty side.
It’s also instructive that we are going to place the burden on already overburdened public school districts. They exist under so many state and federal mandates they can’t see straight. What’s one more? In fact, one could argue that, to the very small degree public schools do contribute to the obesity problem, it is directly related to devoting more and more time to other mandates, like testing.
In his column on the issue, Don Heinzman notes that parents have dropped the ball:
…like so many things these days, the family has difficulty controlling what their youngsters eat and do.
If that is truly the case, what good will be served by targeting school districts? The answer is obviously that the people would rise up in righteous indignation if the state proposed going into people’s homes to enforce “wellness.” So, just like putting the thumb on business owners to force private citizens to quit smoking, big government will use the passive aggressive approach of working through schools, which have little to no power to change how families behave.
In other words, the state’s plan is pure window dressing. That’s the good news. The bad news is that every time we allow government more access to our private behavior we get a little closer to a frightening reality in which government does find it acceptable to enter our homes and dictate lifestyle.
Remember this the next time a politician says we can’t let “the threat of terrorism” erode our civil rights. What they really mean is “that’s my job.”