Anyone who has attended or witnessed a Tea Party rally has to be struck by the number of (overwhelmingly white) obese people who are "active" in the "movement". I use the the words "active" and "movement" ironically, since many of these people can barely move and instead ride scooters which are paid for by the very government-run Medicare programs they abhor. The investigative reporter Matt Taibbi wrote in Rolling Stone about attending a Tea Party gathering in Kentucky:
Scanning the thousands of hopped-up faces in the crowd, I am immediately struck by two things. One is that there isn't a single black person here. The other is the truly awesome quantity of medical hardware: Seemingly every third person in the place is sucking oxygen from a tank or propping their giant atrophied glutes on motorized wheelchair-scooters. As Palin launches into her Ronald Reagan impression — "Government's not the solution! Government's the problem!" — the person sitting next to me leans over and explains.
Obesity rates are skyrocketing in the US according an article today in Die Welt:
Schon heute ist mehr als jeder dritte US- Amerikaner fettleibig, und in den kommenden Jahren wird die Zahl der Dicken weiter wachsen. Erst wenn mindestens 42 Prozent der US-Bürger extrem übergewichtig sind, ist der Höhepunkt der Fettsucht-Epidemie erreicht, wie Forscher der Harvard-Universität in Cambridge (US-Staat Massachusetts) errechnet haben. Noch bis zum Jahr 2050 kann die Zahl fettleibiger Menschen in den USA demnach zunehmen, schreiben die Forscher um Alison Hill im Fachblatt „PLoS Computational Biology“.
(Already now more than one out of every three Americans is obese, and in the coming years the number of overweight people will continue to grow. Only whan at least 42% of US citizens are extremely overweight with the obesity epidemic reach its high point, Harvard researchers have calculated. Tne number of obese people in the US can continue to increase until 2050, writes Alison Hill in the journal "PLoS Computational Biology.)
The researchers further discovered that obesity tends to be "infectious"a as a person’s likelihood of becoming obese increases with each additional obese family member, friend, or acquaintance he or she has. What’s more, obese people appear to have a stronger influence on their friends and family now than they did in 1971, when the earliest data used in the study was collected.
The open question pertaining to the angry army of obese Tea Partiers is whether their infantile ideology is as "infectious" as their body weight disorder.
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Strangly, there are places in the U.S. where it is unusual to see obese people, such as in San Francisco and Seattle and (of course) New York City.
I was shocked on a recent trip to the Washington State coast, however, to see entire families of gigantically obese people. The norm was to be white and obese in that crowd.
I’ve got to say that friends of mine who were once on the heavy side have become obese, but they are living forever anyway. I can’t figure that out.
Your writing smacks of the European ‘we are all slim, Americans are all fat’ …. ‘we Euros are so progressive while those Yankee cowboys are such hicks’ mentality.
If this is German-American opinion, I’d say take the ‘American’ out of it and ship the lot back across the Atlantic.
And before you call me a racist, I am a HINDU American.. difference being that our people are actually loyal to USA.
Hey Ron, I’m a loyal American, too. That doesn’t mean I have to like the fat slobs in the Tea Party…
ever just think that they’re old? I mean, the U.S. baby boomer generation is now nearing senior citizen age (if they haven’t gotten there alread) so it obviously makes sense that elderly people would use more medical equipment anyway doesn’t it? aside from that does it matter, oh an obese american, oh an obese Briton, oh an obese German; –Who Cares anyway?, if you really care do a study of obesity in the U.S. Military and of non-military personnel and tell me the ‘new’ percentage