The Blackboard
(May 2004)

 “Past, Present, Future-Slothing Our Youth”
By Ron Jones, MS

 
US Gurgitators Cookie Jarvis (age 36, 409 pounds) & Eric Booker (age 36, 420 pounds)
This is NOT attractive or healthy!

Past.  Jump back a few decades to grade school PE classes.  It was a military fitness environment—push ups, pull ups, sit ups, running miles not just a lap plus a few sports thrown in.  Very few kids were overweight and most of the kids were reasonably fit.  Students dressed out and worked out and benefited from the vigorous activities and were healthy and entered the adult world physically productive.

1940s Women's Fitness!

            Present.  A good friend of mine teaches middle school PE for the Panama District.  He’s been keeping statistics on student fitness performance since the mid 1980s.  I was riding my bike last fall by his house and stopped to chat about the current state of fitness affairs with our kids.  He sadly reported that many exercises that were “routine” 20 years ago have been removed today because the kids are so overweight and/or unfit that they cannot perform simple exercises.  Back in the day we thought nothing about climbing up a rope or wrestling through a pull up or two or cranking out a set of sit ups plus running a few laps if not miles during the same PE class.  Today many children (and especially those in Bakersfield more than other places) cannot run one stupid lap without walking or do one single pull up or one single quality push up—this is bull crap!  Many of our high school students don’t even bother to dress out anymore let alone participate.  Why?  Maybe the political correctness keeps us from forcing the kids into the “old fashioned” public showers.  Maybe it’s because they are so damn fat and out of condition that they don’t want to publicly humiliate themselves.  Maybe it’s all the above and just all bull crap!  We’ve got kids leaving high school with adult diseases.  We’ve already had high school kids with heart attacks because of morbid obesity.  Teen girls flash the fat as high fashion.  They display their third degree burn looking stretch marks as proudly as Marine Corps Drill Sargent stripes!  Have they no pride and discipline for their health and bodies?! Obviously not.  What’s next?

            Future.  Forget the old school nursing stations in high school.  They’ll be retrofitted for cardiac rehab!  “Walking” to class will become obsolete and not politically correct because the students will be too obese and too out of shape for normal mobility.  Electric carts will shuttle Junior to and fro between Mickie D’s across the parking lot and the school vending machines.  The next “issue” for teachers will be those damn electric scooters racing down the hallways.  We will create handicap sports for all the unfit and obese kids that can’t hack normal activity.  For those opposed to any sort of physical activity, new “Gurgitator” over-eating sports will emerge.  The “Food Jocks” will proudly wear hot dog and hamburger pins on their letterman’s jackets.  The “Gurgitator All-Stars” will be all the rage as they race towards cardiac oblivion.  Don’t like this futuristic prediction?  Then get mad as hell and start doing something to change the status quo!

Reality.  Think all this is bull crap?  The Jetsons and Dick Tracy seemed a bit far out at one time too.  Gurgitators are already petitioning the Olympic Committee to include “over eating” as an official Olympic sport.  The International Federation of Competitive Eating has a website (www.ifoce.com), newsletter, clothing store, international following, celebrity “eaters” and a motto of “Nothing in moderation.”  Our fat-assed kids are much closer to the reality of the above than Dick Tracy was to wrist watch phones in the 1940s.  What is truly bull crap is this ridiculous political correctness that refuses to address the obesity and lack of youth fitness head on.  What an absolute shame to throw away the health of America’s future.  The truth is that we are killing our kids with too much food and lack of activity.  We are selling out our kids for sloth.  This is the first generation of American children predicted to NOT outlive their parents—and that’s truly bull shit!  Fitness is Power.  GET IT ON—and get your kids moving with you before they die “heavily” in your arms! 

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