Good God Almighty, I’m Free and Vast!
The proposed, or threatened, preventive-health initiatives “almost certain” to be part of Obama health reform — “nutrition counseling, obesity screenings […] wellness programs at workplaces and community centers […] more time in the school day for physical fitness, more nutritious school lunches […] more bike paths, walking paths and grocery stores in underserved areas” — are striking some as a nanny-state intrusion on their freedom.
More time in the school day for physical fitness? I’m shocked! Isn’t that what, back in the red-blooded all-American ’50s, used to be S.O.P. under the names of “recess” and “physical education”? Isn’t that the lack whereof is particularly harmful to boys??
As for the rest of it, any attack on the costs of health care has to include, at the very least, incentives for healthy behavior (“though the exact savings are debatable”). As you’ll see in the upcoming post I’m slowly stitching together out of my doctor sister’s e-mails, the current diseases of the American lifestyle are a huge part of what every physician sees.
I am well aware that fitness, slimness, not smoking, and eating organic food are elite luxuries (I myself can’t afford the latter). And I don’t mean to put irony or snark into that. Obama’s finger-shaking-scold quality annoys me when it crops up. (His own lapses are more endearing.) I suppose freedom includes the freedom to behave badly and destroy yourself, or it isn’t freedom. It’s your own damn business, unless you’re forcing secondhand smoke down nonsmokers’ lungs or drunk-driving into a carful of middle-school soccer players.
But Newt recently quoted John Adams as saying only religious people could be trusted with a democratic government. Conservatives, or classical liberals, often quote Edmund Burke’s magnificent words:
Men are qualified for civil liberty in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains upon their own appetites…in proportion as they are more disposed to listen to the counsels of the wise and good, in preference to the flattery of knaves. Society cannot exist, unless a controlling power upon will and appetite be placed somewhere; and the less of it there is within, the more there must be without. It is ordained in the eternal constitution of things, that men of intemperate minds cannot be free. Their passions forge their fetters.
How do you practically reconcile the freedom to behave badly with the expectation that bank-breaking medical care should then fix you up? (It’s plenty complicated, because — here comes an understatement — not everyone who’s sick brought it on themselves, nor does abstemiousness guarantee health. Fitness guru James Fixx dropped dead while running, and the founder of Rodale Press croaked right on the Cavett show while bragging about his healthy lifestyle. However, we do know that smoking, inactivity, and diet-triggered diabetes are killers.) I mean practically — not just saying that we ought to have more weight-loss prayer groups. Just because you don’t like Obama, it doesn’t mean he’s wrong about . . . recess.
~ amba
Ambiance 