After the but ...

“Individual freedoms and rights are great, but ….” It’s a great sounding beginning, and most people stop there. They just stop paying attention after the comma. The United States is the land of the free after all. We are free to rise or fall on our own talents and ambitions. What else is there to know? Unless, of course you are falling. The funny thing, is that even many of the folks who are falling tend to overlook the comma. Maybe they forget it is there. Maybe they don’t want to see it. Maybe they have been convinced that it is their fault. Whatever the reason, ignoring it doesn’t make it not exist. What comes after the comma is the most important part. It’s a big old “but.” This baby has got back.

Want a look at that “but”? Well, one way, is to consider our weight problem. There are actually a lot of overweight folks in this country. Poor eating habits are part of it. A lack of exercise is part of it. Whatever the causes, there are at least an equal number of potential solutions. The State of Georgia is in the midst of an advertising campaign with a divided focus, part education and part embarrassment. The First Lady is leading up attempts to improve the quality of school lunches. Higher insurance premiums are in play. In some countries they even build in more serious penalties for overweight people.

Opponents to these policies, who maybe not so surprisingly include the folks that make and profit off of not so nutritious food, invariably talk of individual choice. They talk of the rights of people to profit off of their ingeniously packaged fat and sugar and of the rights of people to kill themselves by eating it. OK, they don’t talk about it like that, but they do talk about American values, the Founding Fathers, and the threatening specter of big government. They do, but they shouldn’t be allowed to. Here is the problem.

First of all, no one signed the Declaration of Independence thinking they were fighting for our rights to eat Big Macs and Twinkies. Thomas Jefferson also didn’t think ketchup was a vegetable. And so what if they did … Thomas Jefferson had slaves cooking his food.

Second, are folks really free to choose the foods they want? Don’t the big food companies and their lobbying groups pressure the government to change food recommendations to suit their needs? Aren’t fatty foods marketed and sold? Are we going to say that kids who are given crap food at school have chosen it? And shouldn’t free choice be tied to full information? Do people have full information when they make food choices? Do they know all the long term consequences? Do they even really know what is in what they eat? They do have potential access to more information than they ever have had before, but is a small and silent label enough. Plus, wasn’t it the big bad Government that forced the inclusion of those labels?

Third, what about the rest of us? Have we freely chosen to pay the costs of other folk’s heart disease? I don’t think I did, but maybe I missed that vote.

Fourth, why are we pretending that freedom, liberty, and equal opportunity are things that grow on trees? People didn’t have these things before they came together in societies and created Governments. That’s why they set up Governments. They realized that there were some things they could not achieve on their own and a lot that they couldn’t protect once they achieved it. They realized that people impacted one another, and they wanted to be able to control the severity of that impact. When you eat fatty food and don’t exercise, and then die of heart disease at 58 after a long hospitalization, you impact other people. Some of them are people you know, but many of them are people you don’t know. The same is true of smoking cigarettes, urinating in public, running a fracking operation, or loaning money to folks to buy a house that they can’t afford. The idea that we should all be free to do these things even if they harm our fellow Americans is stupid, and frankly anti-American. Unchecked freedom was proven long long ago to be nothing worth desiring, not too long before the myth of the unfettered free market was blown apart. Revisiting these notions, rather through honest deregulation or neutering regulatory agencies so that the EPA lawyers have to do their copying themselves at Kinkos, is dumb and dangerous … kind of like calling Ketchup a vegetable.

It is time those of us with some sense stop tolerating these notions. And it’s not enough to react defensively. We have to go on the offensive against anyone that speaks this nonsense out loud. They should be regarded in the same way as we regard neo-Nazis and KKK members. If you don’t think so, read the Jungle by Upton Sinclair or Twenty Years at Hull House by Jane Addams. Learn about what is being done to our drinking water and our retirement funds. See what is happening in inner city schools. It is time for us to read what comes after the “but.” It is time for us to scream it. It is time for us to live it.