Liberal myopia reached new levels of absurdity this week, with NPR running a story straight out of The Onion. I keep expecting a retraction from NPR to make the news, or at least some kind of editorial error statement. In fact, all they did was change the headline of their story so that the photo of two morbidly obese chronic welfare recipients was no longered featured next to the words "Even Meat is Out of Reach."
The jokes wrote themselves all week, and even when NPR changed the headline to a more generic "Economic Woes," the damage was done. They must have a covert conservative operative among them; there is no way even the most devoted disciple of socialism could not see the irony in a story about 300lb women lamenting that they are consuming less meat and ice cream than they used to as evidence of "hard times" in America.
We food shop at a market where you can buy tomatoes and onions for less than 50 cents a pound, where you can buy any kind of fresh fuit or vegetable you could want for a fraction of the best supermarket price. The market is within walking distance of many low-income neighborhoods, and buses regularly run by. Lots of urban "poor" go there, but mostly they are waddling around buying chicken wings and ribs and ground beef and turkey bacon. So I don't for a second believe the "poor are overweight because they don't have access to good food" excuse. Every week I stand there watching 300lb people walking past the asparagus and carrots and the apples, all of it at prices that could feed a family for ten dollars a week. And I also don't believe the whole "poor fat people don't understand that carrots are healthier than BBQ ribs, and even if they did, they don't know how to make meals consisting of healthy alternatives anyway." I can't even believe I hear this excuse from the same people who vehemently claim that poverty has nothing to do with stupidity.
I don't want to live in a country where my income is taxed first to house and feed creatures that are barely mobile, and then further taxed to cover the creature's medical bills as they eat themselves to death. I simply don't care about saving the whales.