Larg and in charg.

A New York man gives a tearful goodbye hug.

The other day, New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg came up with a new proposal to ban all soft drinks over 16 fl oz, within the confines of New York City. Aside from this being a terrible idea, being grossly unconstitutional, and being a complete insult to the collective intelligence of the American people, this ban on soft drinks is simply the latest pathetic attempt to get people skinny, but it completely fails to address the real problem.

Well what is the real problem? Don’t we have to do something to fight the American obesity epidemic?!

No. America doesn’t have an obesity epidemic.

America has a war on fat people.

I know! I know… Fat people…

They’re tough to look at. They smell, sometimes. It’s not pleasant.

You see an overweight woman, pasty white, in a stretched out bikini, blubbering down the beach like a beluga whale. You stomach starts to turn. “Surely,” you think, “this must be pornography.”

But we need to take a step back. That voice in your head muttering “WHOA BESSIE” every time a fat man gets up from a recliner, that’s the prejudice asshole inside of you. Come on, people? Where’s your sense of culture? What happened to live and let live?

Honestly, I think that maybe fat people just know something that we don’t. We like cheeseburgers, we like beer, and when we have one, we want more of the other. This is the human condition. Cheeseburgers are not heroin. Fat people do not have to apologize.

Besides, you only get one chance on Earth. You could die tomorrow! The sun could explode, the world could fall into a deep freeze. That fact alone is all reason you need to justify your life choices, including the life choice to NEVER turn down a chimichanga.

I know what happened. It all started in the eighties, when that loony Richard Simmons decided to “Dance his pants off!” in your wife’s living room, making weight loss a trend. Now we pay $50 for a bottle of “men’s formula multivitamins” which are basically just an expensive way to make your piss turn funny colors, and we shout and the fatties below, “WHAT’S WRONG WITH YOU?”

It was once a very proud thing to be a hefty person. Indeed, fatness was a sign of wealth, a sign of affluence. What’s wrong with them? What’s wrong with us?

Maybe, just maybe, this whole obesity epidemic is being taken a little bit out of proportion? We can blame bad parenting, and poor food choice options, and of course we can blame the EVIL McDONALDS CORPORTATION for turning us all into little porker zombies, unable to break our tragic addiction to milkshakes and cheeseburgers. But maybe that anger is a little bit misplaced.

This is truly what we call a “first world problem”. It’s a problem that we have the privilege of having. We have finally made it, as a society, to a point where we have more food than we know what to do with. How about, instead of legislating our eating habits, how’s about we just work on making better tasting healthy food? The day that broccoli tastes like spare ribs, obesity is going to go the way of the dinosaur.

It’s time to end the war. It’s time to make peace. Banning soft drinks is a new year’s resolution, not government charter. Take a page out of Marie Antionette’s book. “Let them eat cake.”

"I don't like fat people."
- My mother, as we ate breakfast together this morning.