By now you all may have seen or heard about the obese Wisconsin news anchor who received a letter from a viewer admonishing her to lose weight lest she send out the wrong message to our nation's youth. Not willing to leave soul-crushing embarrassment alone, the broadcaster, Jennifer Livingston, eventually went on air in a four minute personal address to the letter writer after her own husband angrily posted the letter on the internet, turning it viral. The proverbial elephant in the room, I guess.
Personally, I learned about all this on Facebook, and then on Facebook some more, and then even more on Facebook after that. And I don't have very many Facebook friends. (People hate me.) Typically, the posting was accompanied by a rousing tagline of "You Go Girl!" or "Down With Bullying!" or some fawning ode to the beauty and courage of the victim in question.
Which is the part I fail to understand. Well, there's two parts. First, when did it become bullying to write a polite, signed letter to a public figure? Livingston readily admits that she is visibly overweight, even cops that over the years many other viewers have pointed out that same fact. And yet while the actual motive of the letter writer (purportedly offering help to lose weight) is questionable, he is bullying her no more than when a complete strange admonishes me for smoking a cigarette. Would my Facebook friends call me "beautiful and courageous" for telling the world to fuck off and that I am hurting no one but myself? (And don't even start with the "second hand smoke" bullshit. Car exhaust is far more harmful to one's health and no one says boo about our beloved automobiles.) If criticizing someone is bullying them, then is it "bullying" when the President is publicly excoriated on a minute-by-minute basis, in print, on the air, or sometimes even right to his face? No, it's simple discourse. Is it "bullying" when you get a negative performance review at work? Is it "bullying" when a police officer pulls you over for speeding? Will it soon be "bullying" for a teacher to issue a failing grade to a student? And why did Jennifer Livingston's husband publicize the letter in the first place? Who's the real bully here?
But beyond the specious bullying charges, can someone please explain to me who the "beautiful and courageous" woman is in this scenario? Because to me, it's not Jennifer Livingston. Oh, she is a pretty lady and she seems to have quite the personality. It's only a guess, though, because I don't know her at all. But I do know one thing and I can say it without knowing anything about Jennifer Livingston except for what I see: Obesity is plain, flat-out, categorically NOT beautiful and it should not be celebrated.
My father is a case in point. At his fattest he weighed a little over 325 pounds on his 6'1" frame, and he didn't get that way by accident. He got that way by eating at Wendy's or Rally's several times a week, by eating half a bag of potato chips every night after a large dinner, by eating several slices of pie every morning for breakfast. He loudly scoffed at anyone who questioned his eating habits and his prodigious weight gain and bragged many, many times about his Herculean "ticker." Bragged himself all the way to triple bypass, in fact.
Now he is almost completely dependent upon me and my mother for his daily care, and has been for almost eight years. He can barely walk, and struggles with the most basic of activities. But his grease-clogged arteries were only half the story. Most of his disability has come from complications from diabetes, a condition he largely ignored until it became inextricably intertwined with his prolonged and elusive recovery from open heart surgery. Weakened from multiple hospitalizations for congestive heart failure post-surgery, he had difficulty moving because of his weight, resulting in small bedsores that festered and turned into gruesome, golf-ball sized wounds that you could slip your entire thumb into. More than once he faced amputation, somehow dodging the bullet every time. His legs and feet are now engorged and shiny, the color of eggplant. A few months ago he bled out a pint of blood into his shoe before he even discovered it, from a cut on his foot that he didn't know he even had. The tops of his hands are oddly indented and mottled with black spots. He can barely see anymore. His medicines, about fourteen per day, have caused him to lose control of his bladder and he's in wet trousers most of the time. When he falls down, we must call the police as he fears that my mom and I will only drop him again. His hospital, doctor, and home health care bills, mostly covered by Medicare, are approaching one million dollars. Because I live with him, I don't feel like my life is entirely my own. I will be frank--he is a burden.
Like a lot of overweight people, my father did not eat comically boundless amounts of food. He just ate about twice as much as he really needed. It's not hard to do--food is delicious and abundant. He also wasn't very active. He never passed up an opportunity to ask someone to take his plate into the kitchen or to run something upstairs for him or to help him unload the car. He cheerfully mocked the untimely death of marathoner Jim Fixx, frequently intoning "Exercise kills!" He lived unaware. Even now he scorns the notion of food as medicine, as anything but calories. And he has said to me, more than a few times, that none of this is his fault and that I should mind my own business.
But blowing up a million dollar health care tab in the space of eight years, all because of overindulging, is my business. My father's surgeries, multiple hospitalizations, ambulance visits, convalescent care, home health care, doctors' appointments and medications are mostly funded by the government. The same government that helps to feed babies of poor single mothers. The same government that helps a struggling minority family heat their home. Freebies for so-called lazy, weak people that are squarely hated by the right wing. But let's face it--no matter how much "health care" my father continues to receive, he will not be getting better. Poor people get on their feet, they educate their children, they get better jobs, they buy homes. Not all the time, but often. My father is going to die.
So while conservatives angrily rail against food stamps and welfare and imaginary free cell phones for the poor, arguing that poverty is just a personal choice made by worthless "takers," there is a conspicuous, yet defeaning, silence when it comes to people like my father who throw their health away. Where's the outrage here? Is it obvious only to me that eating healthfully is much, much easier than increasing your income? Or raising children whose father doesn't pay child support? Or paying rent and utilities when you can't find a job? Is not eating processed food and junk from McDonald's really that much of a dealbreaker?
My thinking is that that Jennifer Livingston is headed down the same path as my father. It will start simply with a diagnosis of high blood pressure and elevated blood sugar levels, requiring a small, daily dose of a beta blocker or maybe just a diuretic, and then perhaps a glucose inhibitor or a sulfonylurea. Since she will still be relatively young, her health insurance will pay for most of it. Maybe her doctor will explain the benefits of a dietary overhaul, but one thing we as Americans do is WE DO NOT EAT ANYTHING WE DO NOT LIKE, so if she's like most people Jennifer will just opt for the drugs. In time, her cholesterol level will have to be addressed, and then her Vitamin D deficiency and then, as a precautionary measure, her doctor will put her on blood thinners. Thinking that she is addressing the problem by eating 100-calorie snack packs and fat-free frozen yogurt, Jennifer will continue to gain weight, putting even more pressure on her heart, and now on her joints. So bring on the arthritis medicine! Her first surgery, maybe just a knee replacement, or perhaps something way more serious, will then usher in a dizzying array of complications. And, of course, more medicine. And she will become my father.
Strangly, all of this will happen so slowly that no one will really even notice. The beautiful, talented and spirited wife, mother, and career woman who is doing just fine, THANK YOU, without the mean letters from total strangers will slowly morph into the weak and diseased morbidly obese woman who rides the motorized cart around Kroger. Oh, to be sure no one will approve of her physical appearance, even less less so than now. But no one will be thinking, "Wow, there's a few hundred thousand dollars of taxpayer money loading Wonder Bread and Beefaroni into her electric cart."
So let's stop robotically arguing that Medicare is sacred and untouchable simply owing to the inevitabilities of aging. Getting old, fat and sick is not foreordained. Good health is not just good luck. It's good choices.
Let's stop proudly counting off all the foods we hate, as if it physically hurts to eat some raw broccoli or drink a few glasses of water every day. Here's what hurts: infections and needles and scalpels and catheters and amputation. Being trapped in the house most of the time doesn't feel so good either.
But most of all, how about we all stop pretending that being fat is nothing more than an alternative life style. It's not. And it's not beautiful.
