Private Message

Okay, rhinoceros-ass, you can howl and whine all you want. You ruin every opportunity that comes your way by lying and interfering in the affairs of real people with actual pursuits while doing nothing helpful or constructive. I tried to help with certain objectives, but you were unwilling to take the necessary responsibility involved. Don't act as if you were a victim.....and stop mooching! The reason no one wants to pick you up when you hitchhike and the reason you have so many problems finding lodging is because you're a big, fat, dishonest, ugly mooch.

You should stop telling people you've never taken anything from anyone when your dirty Starbucks cup gets thrown away by whoever cleans up after you've graced a building with your smelly presence. Twenty dollars disappeared from a child's wallet while you were here.

The type of emergency medical care you recently mooched was not the kind you need. While being as fat as a rhinoceros is certainly a physical problem, the kind of perception that causes a fatty such as yourself to eat entire cupboards full of food in one sitting and force children to fight you for a meal, or for shelter, is a much more grave problem. Unfortunately, others with grave problems also do not deserve to be forced to share quarters and resources with you, either. Is that what the volunteer from the shelter told you, before you dissed him on Facebook? Or did he just refuse to comply with some silly-assed demand you made, which would have forced him to displace actual disaster and emergency victims, should he have attempted to enable you?

Big Brother Says Our Kids Can't Be Too Fat

Seriously? If my son or daughter is overweight, I can get a visit from a social worker and the sheriff, and have my family split up and disrupted? But.........let me get this straight.......if a kid complains that his parents won't let him eat, or won't let him have a winter coat, or presents with obvious signs of abuse resulting from violence, that's okay, and social services will just "keep and eye" on the parents (whatever that means) and let the kid stay with them. But; with all the budget cuts, we have enough money to separate the families of overweight children and exacerbate the stress those children already experience! No joke; I read it here. Dr. David Ludwig, with Childrens Hospital Boston, thinks we should start reporting fat kids the same way we report battered kids.

A battered child goes through so much when social services takes him away from his parents. Not that it isn't ever called for; at times, it is. Often, siblings are split up, with no effort to keep any contact at all between the siblings. Sure, a cursery effort is made, but not much is really done to keep brothers and sisters together. There are times when it's impossible. A lot of parents don't want a child back when the child has been removed from parental custody. The child represents failure to the parent, and the parent would rather blame the child. Is it really the parent's fault if the child is obese, anyway?

Those are just a couple of problems with the whole idea of removing overweight children from parental custody. I can't help but wonder where the good Dr. Ludwig thinks he should draw the line between morbid obesity, obesity, and "chubby". Would a parent who isn't popular become the victim of community harassment if his kid was a little bit fat? This could create legal nightmares!

Ultimitely, the most obvious problem with Dr. Ludwig's wonderful brainstorm is this:

Jerri Gray, a Greenville, S.C., single mother who lost custody of her 555-pound 14-year-old son two years ago, said authorities don't understand the challenges families may face in trying to control their kids' weight.

"I was always working two jobs so we wouldn't end up living in ghettos," Gray said. She said she often didn't have time to cook, so she would buy her son fast food. She said she asked doctors for help for her son's big appetite but was accused of neglect.

Her sister has custody of the boy, now 16. The sister has the money to help him with a special diet and exercise, and the boy has lost more than 200 pounds, Gray said.

"Even though good has come out of this as far as him losing weight, he told me just last week, 'Mommy, I want to be back with you so bad.' They've done damage by pulling us apart," Gray said.

We have a cultural problem on our hands, and no family is perfect. Children are not encouraged to exercise anymore, and lot of schools will not even allow children to ride their bikes to school. We pump our kids full of drugs for ADHD, and discourage the very lifestyle that will help the most with obesity in children. There are so many conflicting messages! Each family with this issue, if it's really an issue, is going to have to find it's own way to cope, the same way each person with a medical problem has to find his own way to accomodate the medical problem. Forcing children to say goodbye to brothers, sisters, pets, and home, and telling them that they can no longer live with parents who love them somehow does not seem like the answer, when there are children in this country who really are in grave danger because of actual abuse. That may be the biggest conflicting message of all about Dr. Ludwig's recommendations. I hope no one listens to him.