Month: September 2009

I wrote this blog two and a half years ago. So what do you say? Have things changed? Looking forward to your answers.

Fat, dumb and happy, this seems to describe the average American right now. We are the most obese nation in the world as well as, fat with information, education, money, resources, have the most consumerism and yet we can’t be filled. There is simply never enough for us as we consume everything set before us and are left empty and desiring more.

Our children are considered the least educated, compared to the countries that are our counterparts. Our teachers scream they aren’t paid enough and more money would fix the problem yet, we spend per capita the most per student of any of these other countries. We have a powerful political teachers union and what is actually eating the money is, the administration of how it is spent, we spend at the top, recruit the best teachers into administrative positions. Then there is the fact that we have some inept teachers, whom we can’t fire because they have tenure, and we can’t hire new teachers, who are on the ball, because we don’t have the funds.

We no longer teach spelling anymore because as the teachers at my children’s school told us, we don’t need to, we have spell check. But if you didn’t come close to spelling the word in the first place, then it’s of little help. Those of us who read blogs see the spelling errors, and know what I am talking about. And forget sentence structure, I didn’t learn it either. Even the newspapers today have misspelled words.

We watch television for all of our information and we rarely read anything. Try to get someone to read a book and they act like Superman with Kryptonite. Some people actually brag, “I haven’t read a book since high school, bless God!” With the No Child Left Behind Act, at least here in California, kids are being passed and yet they can’t read beyond a third grade level. This limits their potential and I don’t understand what we think they are going to be able to accomplish with their life.

We play video games for hours and hours and we allow our children to play them for hours as well. We ignore the violence in them and call them harmless entertainment. When I was in school we had one overweight kid in our class, his name was Carl. The rest of us were just average sized kids. Drive by any school today and average sized kids aren’t the norm anymore. We are a sedentary group who prefers online chat to riding a bike. When we were kids we played outside after school. The increase in childhood illness increases daily and diabetes and heart disease is being detected earlier and earlier. We’re endangering our children and we don’t seem to mind so much. Fast food is what we eat and Super Size It!

Kids have cell phones, portable DVD players, credit cards, every video game known to man, portable video game players and yet, they are always bored.

We have been lulled into thinking this is life! We’ve been told that to be fat and dumb is to be happy. This is a total lie. The fact is people have never been more miserable. Anti-depressant medication is being prescribed like candy. We have more stuff but it doesn’t fulfill us.

We live in the best country in the world, at least I believe so. People are literally dying to come here. Yet we, who should be thanking God that we live here, complain and act apathetic. We can live a different life. We can live a truly content life but it’s going to take us standing up, deciding not to drink the punch of passivity and getting active. Active in determining that we don’t have to live like the neighbors. Determining to be active as we take control of our health and well being. We need to get active in believing that we can live life more peacefully debt free and giving ourselves to service, rather than to consume all that we have and mortgage our lives away. We can get active by more family activities and less stuff. We can learn to read what is really happening in our world and then actively making positive changes to fix it. We can learn to be properly informed about what is going on in the world and that requires not just reading what our media is telling us, but getting some international news and reading a different perspective. There is a whole world out there that we are missing out on.

There was a time when we interacted with one another, now we text, call on cell phone and email and somehow that makes up for fellowship. Yet studies show that people live longer and more satisfied lives when their life is simple and they meet with friends on a regular basis. So the choice is, fat, dumb and happy or healthy, informed and fulfilled. Seems simple but it requires we get off our collective butts and get moving in the right direction!