Saving the Economy One Fat Kid at a Time
by Jack Cashill
Ten years ago, after about 20 or so years of wandering in my own personal desert—one with ample watering holes, I must confess—I started going to church again.
The church in question is a traditional Catholic Church in Kansas City, Kan. For a variety of reasons, I sit in the back and watched everyone come and go.
Thus, I have no excuse for taking 10 years to notice what I just noticed a few weeks ago. A family hurried in late: a mother and father and about half a dozen kids. Although the parents are both a bit chunky—the mom, given the odds, pregnant—all six or so kids were nicely trim.
Wondering if this were an anomaly, I watched all the kids as they exited, about 200 in total divided among 40 or so families. Did I mention that this was a traditional Catholic Church?
Among any group of kids, you’d expect some porkers. According to a recent study of more than 8,000 representative children, ages 2 to 19, done by Children's Hospital Boston, 16 percent of American children are obese and two-thirds of those are extremely obese.
The doctors cautioned that the already overburdened healthcare system would groan under the weight of this “childhood epidemic” for decades to come as it plays itself out in costly and sometimes deadly complications like heart attacks, diabetes, and kidney failure.
I found it curious that the doctor in question, David Ludwig by name, used the term “epidemic” to describe the obesity problem. Epidemic implies two things: one that obesity is a disease and the second that it is contagious. It is,in fact, neither.
Based on the Boston statistics, which track closely with past studies, one would expect that of the 200 kids at my church roughly 30 of them would have been obese and 20 of those extremely obese. In fact, there are no—as in zero—obese kids among the 200.
After Mass, I quizzed some of the moms on the phenomenon. None, I discovered, had given much thought to keeping their children fit. They simply cooked the family dinners each night, made the kids’ breakfast and lunch, served little in the way of junk food, limited the TV and the video games, pushed the kids outside to play, and, without intending to, kept the fat epidemic at bay.
In short, these kids grew up like most of the readers of this magazine did, back before obesity was an epidemic or a disease, and you were still allowed to make fun of fat kids, which in itself discouraged obesity at the street level.
This is not to deny a tendency to obesity in certain families. Mine was one such family. Being more vain than my siblings and cousins, and being removed from the great greasy heroes and pizza of my native New Jersey, I have fought the good fight more successfully.
A few years ago, in fact, I proposed to write a book entitled “Staying Skinny in a Fat Family” and asked my relatives for anecdotes. Not since I threw a football through the dining room window just before a Christmas dinner did I annoy so many of my kin so thoroughly. I respectfully withdrew the proposal.
One other thing I have noticed about the kids at my church has to do with ADD, ADHD and those other behavioral disorders said to bedevil our offspring.
According to a recent study by the Mayo Clinic, Attention-Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder(ADHD) afflicts some 7.5 percent of all kids. Talk to a public school teacher, and she will tell you that the percent of disruptive and squirmy in a given classroom is often much higher. Many of these kids get their own special programs and teacher’s aides, all of which adds cost and none of which helps the other kids learn.
Based on statistics, at least 15 kids in our church should have ADHD. Yet, from what I can see, there are none. Every kid over 2 in that church can keep her or, more impressively, his yap shut through 90-plus minutes of utterly incomprehensible Latin, and this includes a few kids with Downs Syndrome.
More impressively still, I counted 32 altar boys on the altar last week, half of them under 10, all of whom were able to kneel or sit attentively and quietly in full view of the congregation for the duration of the Mass.
These boys have one thing in common: a father who has taken them to church every Sunday, sat beside them, and firmly and frequently prodded them until they could sit up straight and pay attention on their own. This process, as I have seen, takes years.
I cite obesity and behavioral disorders as two expensive symptoms out of many that tend to occur in homes that lack an attentive full-time father, a trend that the government has, wittingly or otherwise, encouraged over the last 50 years.
To be sure, the value of a high-functioning family goes well beyond controlling fat and ADHD. A society that successfully encouraged and rewarded marriage could cut its tax burden in half.
ER staffers could focus on the victims of accidents and illnesses; shootings, stabbings, and ODs would consume them no more. The police and rescue people could so the same.
Drug cartels would take their business elsewhere. Like Alcatraz, prisons could become museums. Pimps and pornographers would just about close up shop—“It’s hard out there” for them anyhow—so would divorce lawyers and most personal injury lawyers as well.
Street gangs could shift from larceny and other louche behavior to lawn care and cut the need for illegal immigration along with the grass. Payouts for welfare, housing, food stamps, and Medicaid would shrivel. Taxes would fall, and still there would be additional revenue—as there once was—for in-frastructure, schools, universities, and, yes, even new green technologies.
People from my church get this. Like most traditionalists of whatever faith—from the Amish to the Hassidic—they understand implicitly that the single greatest bulwark against socialism is the functional family. Self-sufficient as they are, they make few demands on the government and expect the government to make few demands on them.
For this reason, when traditionalists enter electoral politics—as several from my church have—they almost inevitably champion limited government and local control. They thus find themselves naturally allied with those friends of free enterprise in the business community who do the same.
Here, though, is today’s conundrum. If their values lead to a low-maintenance, low-tax environment, and if their politics incline strongly towards free enterprise, why is it that the Greater Kansas City Chamber of Commerce—through its various political action committees and cut outs—is spending goo-gobs of money to drive these people out of office?
Don’t believe me? Ask the folks at the Chamber. 
Return to Ingram's August 2008
Jack Cashill is Ingram's Executive Editor and has been affiliated with the magazine for 28 years. He can be reached at jackcashill@yahoo.com. The views expressed in this column are the writer's own and do not necessarily reflect those of Ingram's Magazine.