San Francisco columnist Mark Morford is back from vacation with a sobering set of observations about the level of obesity among Americans. I’m writing a sermon right now for a UU service this coming Sunday, on the themes of American obsession with health and wellness and how the health care system focuses all on treatment and not at all on prevention, so Mark’s comments tie right in. Here’s an excerpt:
Perhaps this, then, is the new great divide. Forget red state versus blue state. Forget liberal versus conservative, straight versus gay, rich versus poor, mullet versus sideburn, red wine versus white. The new division in America is greater than anything we have seen before: Healthy versus ill. Slim versus fat. Light versus heavy. Clean-running organs and unstrained hearts and the ability to engage with the world around you with something resembling lightness and ease and swift reflexes, versus a sort of indolent awkwardness and dis-ease and pain, an unconscious layering-on of fatty protection against a world gone angry and confusing, followed by an early and very uncomfortable death.