Crumbling of Society: Fat and Stupid

Sometimes (like when you shop at a big box store like Wal-Mart or Costco or something) you see the people around and wonder what is American society coming to? Granted, I’m shopping there too, so I’m included in that group. This is probably coming off a bit snobby (just a bit?) but I give you two examples.

1. America is getting egregiously overweight.
   You know that ride at Disney world, “It’s a small world”. Well, not for Joe America and his family. Disney has had to revamp the ride because it is getting stuck due to the weight of the passengers. See, on the ride you sit in a boat and float along, but the water isn’t too deep to prevent accidental drownings. Well too many overweight passengers and the boat bottoms out and gets stuck. This never happened until the last few years. From the article:

The problem, quite simply, is that the flume that the boats ride in, and the boats themselves, were designed and built in 1963 on the assumption that the male adult riders would average 175 pounds and the women about 135, which they pretty much did at the time. Alas, those figures are as outdated today as the Rocket to the Moon ride.

The ride monitors attempt to leave empty seats on many boats to compensate for the hefty, but this routinely antagonizes the hundreds of paying customers waiting in line. When a boat does bottom out, a long line of other boats backs up behind it, their passengers slowly going mad from listening to the ride’s theme song.

The ride monitors must then track down the stuck boat and attempt tactfully to help a rider or two to exit at one of the emergency platforms, which the riders in question do not always deal with graciously.

When the ride finally reopens, the flume will be an inch or so deeper and the boats more buoyant, thus allowing for several hundred more pounds of capacity. Other rides may also have to be shut down and reconfigured before all is made right; the Pinocchio, Alice In Wonderland and Pirates of The Caribbean rides in particular are prone to being stalled or annoyingly slowed down by overloaded cars.

Americans are used to biggie sized meals, SUVs, etc. that we are just getting larger without consequence. The sad part is is with the state of the medical/insurance system in this country all the health problems that come with that are going to cripple us in a few years.

2. Americans are getting dumber and dumber.

So dumb in fact, that we won’t even learn how to properly budget and save for retirement. No, I don’t want to pay attention to basic math, I’ve gotten rush out and buy a new big screen. The government understands simply trying to teach everyone how to do it won’t work (see: public schools) (I went to a public school, before everyone gets all huffy about it, and yes it was terrible.) So, they are going to use propaganda. Mark this down, because it will be the only time you hear (see?) me say this- I agree with this form of propaganda. They are going to try and slip in educational messages into TV shows. (Source)

The U.S. Treasurer, Anna Escobedo Cabral, was on the radio news program “Marketplace” a couple of weeks ago to talk about how she’s been meeting with the creative teams of soap operas and telenovelas to find ways to incorporate financial storylines into their plots.

The idea, Ms. Cabral says, is to “reach people at teachable moments in their lives” by finding multiple ways to get educational messaging out in the public space.

“Too many kids are graduating high school, for example, not knowing what a budget is, how to balance a checkbook, what a credit card is, what an interest rate is, or how compound interest works… If the treasury tries to do this by itself, it will not be successful, but if you do this in partnership with all the other segments of society, you’re likely to be very successful and in the end the public and the entire country is better off.”

I really think this could work. How many people know basically how a bill works because of school house rock?

PS – sorry for the rant. I’ll return to my normal, happy self now.