Whose Ox Is Next?
Remember the old riddle that went: When they came for my friend across town, I did nothing. Then they came for my cousin, and I did nothing. Then they came for my next door neighbor, and I did nothing.
I wonder who will be there when they come for me.
Or something like that. You get the idea. If it is not my ox being gored, then it’s all right. But, oh, when it becomes my ox’s turn, who will help me save my sweet, little ox?
No one is the answer. You have to not only help yourself, but also you will have to help your friends and neighbors, if you expect someone to be there for you.
Within the last four months, The New York Times has had at least two stories on our social mores and how they are changing. People of means and with power are thinking about charging you an extra tax for being overweight and if you drink sodas. The thinking is that if you are part of the problem in health care, then you should have to pay through a tax.
So if you enjoy a particular soda during the day, one day soon you might be paying an extra few cents worth of tax for that enjoyment.
If you are overweight, some doctors want you to pay a tax on your overweightness to help fund health care for the obese, which as we all are told is in epidemic proportions now in the U.S.
I have a question: On the weight issue, why is it coming down to the individual? The reason our grandfathers and grandmothers were thin is because they worked all day in the fields, no air conditioning, and they ate largely animal-based fats, which our bodies are long accustomed to absorbing, and turning into energy.
My grandfather was a South Georgia peanut farmer. He also planted and harvested sugar cane. He had honeybees, hogs, cows, chickens, a very large vegetable garden. My grandmother cooked three large meals each day, all lard-based.
Like my grandfather, my grandmother was as thin as a fencepost. She hauled water from a well, chopped wood to cook on a wood stove, washed clothes in an iron pot in which she had to boil water, and ironed in her kitchen where she could keep a hot iron heating on the wood stove at all times. It may have been 120 degrees during a hot South Georgia summer in her kitchen as she ironed.
All of their children worked, the boys in the fields with their father and the girls in the house with their mother. None, absolutely none, of them were overweight. And they ate three hefty meals a day, lard-based, with buttermilk biscuits, gravy, fatback, grits, sweet tea, fried chicken, fried okra, home-processed ham, along with fresh vegetables.
And when we get to the present, we find that a majority who are obese have feasted on fast foods, which have been approved by the FDA’s scientists. I’ve read somewhere that some of the burgers and fries at some of the fast-food joints are more calories than you need in two days, let alone one meal.
But, do I hear an outcry from the FDA and the doctors about putting that tax where it should go? To Big Business, to Big Fast Food, to Mega Farms, who are foisting off foods on the American public that produce little energy and add globules of fat? What about taxing farm equipment and air conditioner manufacturers, along with computer and other electronic makers because they have cut the energy and time it takes to do our jobs?
I have the slimmest fingers around, because all I do is type all day. But my gut is sliding toward my ankles, taking everything with it.
Oh, yes, says the health nut community: You can run, walk, jog, play a sport, jump rope, play basketball. I ran for 20 years and blew out a knee. The knee doc told me my running days were over. It took a half-year of physical therapy to get me to the point that I could bend my knee.
After that experience, all I wanted to do was to enjoy my pipes, smoke an occasional cigar, and be left alone by the health and anti-smoking quacks.
The point of all this is: If pipe smokers do not ban together soon, to separate themselves off from the rest of the herd of cigarette smokers, we will find ourselves being taxed just to get up in the morning and breathe.
Our ox is next.
And, some of our Ox’s will be getting it from both ends. How clever. Don’t tax the “fat-food” manufacturer’s. Tax the poor folks that eat their products after watching millions of dollars of advertising telling us it is “low-fat”.