Rick Santorum Doesn’t Read This Blog
[cc photo courtesy of wburris]
I was going to do a bit of a re-frame on my five-part “How Our Society Separates Us From Nature” series, and here comes pragmatic political genius Rick Santorum to give me the perfect launch pad. Santorum said—publicly, if you can believe it—that food stamp programs are unnecessary because poor people are already too fat.
This is a perfect example of a type of framing that right-wing politicians and global warming deniers frequently use to dismiss valid issues. To me (and probably you too if you’re reading this) Santorum’s statement is a blatant falsehood; but you and I don’t live in the ideological world that potential Rick Santorum supporters do. This kind of statement assumes that the hearer is missing the key pieces of information that would expose it as illogical.
Are obese people still people? Do obese people still need to eat to stay alive? Can we have both an obesity crisis and a hunger crisis at the same time? The answer is absolutely yes to all three questions, unless you need to channel people’s thoughts toward protecting a system that cuts critical programs for the poor because increasing tax rates on the rich is out of the question. In that case, ignoring any facts outside a simple correlation between eating too much and being fat—and inviting others to do the same–would be a great strategy as long as no one called you out on it.
I didn’t explore every aspect of Western food problems in my post “A Profit-driven Food System”, but I did touch on some of the reasons for the obesity epidemic in America. That information alone, read with an open mind, should be enough to make someone question Rick Santorum’s logic. The reason I didn’t go into more detail was that I wanted each piece in the series to be just an overview of each issue’s key components. They are all actually so intertwined I found it difficult to deal with each individually.
Why do we have an epidemic of depression, over-eating, poor nutrition, and obesity in this country?
- Windowless workspaces
- A Profit-driven food system
- Consumerism
- Destruction and pollution of nature
- Time poverty
Oh look—it’s my five favorite topics! If you missed them, go back through my last few posts. These are the things I see as the worst dangers to our relationship with nature, and it’s no coincidence that they are also the top dangers to our health and well being. Against the kind of odds I describe in those five posts, it is no one’s fault if they can’t win their personal struggle against obesity, and we certainly aren’t going to combat it as a nation unless we level the playing field. It’s also no coincidence that all five of my favorite topics are the things that work on twenty-four hour autopilot to sustain the inverted pyramid of American wealth inequality. We have a lot of work to do, don’t we?
In the coming weeks, I am going to post some video tutorials about marketing techniques and psychological devices we as environmentalists and defenders of social justice can use to make our message heard above the noise.