4.02.2010

Saving us from ourselves

Seriously?

If this wasn't listed as being posted on March 28, I'd figure it was an April Fool's Day gag. Some idiot destroyed a bunch of packages of meat in an Indiana supermarket on a quest to save chubby girls from themselves. Seems he's a vegetarian with a great sense of moral righteousness over it for all of the wrong reasons. Now, I happen to be a vegetarian myself, though purely as an issue of personal taste. I'm sympathetic to the ethical concerns, but I can't say they are a driving force for me and I certainly eat products ethical vegetarians would justifiably balk at. Like Skittles. But Coffman comes from the new PETA inspired school of vegetarian ethics where its not that killing animals is wrong. Its that eating them will make women you could otherwise sexually objectify into fat women.

Look, I get that this guy is a nut job and will be rightly laughed at for his little escapade. He even tosses out an extremely narcissistic "God told me to do it" for good measure. But lets not forget that a lot of people out there are preaching pretty much the same thing as him. They just aren't actually going into a grocery store with a knife. But they harbor just as much self-righteousness over the notion that we fatties need to be saved from ourselves. They might find more socially acceptable means of expressing their belittlement of us like suggesting tax penalties for being fat, mandated "fitness" programs for employment, or government mandated surcharges on whatever they feel is subjecting them to our fat bodies. In private they might even muse about forced amputations of our digestive systems and other such extreme actions. There isn't really that much that separates their inanity from this screwball except his knife. We should remember, though, that we live in a society which sanctions looking down on fat people as moral and intellectual inferiors by virtue of our body mass. I'm shocked more people don't take this as a licenses to abuse us, but the real truth is plenty do just that but in far more subtle and insidious ways than slashing packages of beef.