Look, I know this is not a real fix to the weight/girth issue, but what if, just to make us all feel thinner and appear more attractive to one another, we all wore glasses with lenses like fun-house mirrors that made everything and everyone look drastically thinner? Wouldn't that help us at least enjoy life in denial? And then maybe someone could develop a Lasik surgical treatment to attain/obtain (or something with the suffix "tain" in it, anyway) the same effect. Wouldn't that be marvelous? Then we could eat all we wanted, and still seem thin. And we could revise all health and beauty standards to be viewed through these glasses. (And we could change the expression: "seeing the world through rose-colored glasses" to: "seeing the world through slimming glasses". Plus, we could all laugh at how ridiculously thin all foreigners would look to us. (Making it a win/win all around! Well, except perhaps for airlines and air travel, etc.: they would have to have different sizes of seats for Americans and for everyone else. But they're going to have to do that anyway, apparently, so the sooner they get on this the better for everyone! Or maybe they could simply have all Americans fly in First Class, since they already have bigger, wider seats, and have everyone else fly in coach. And this policy would have a subtext to it that America is #1, so it's also very patriotic! This doesn't actually solve the problem of obesity, but it would make us all feel a lot better about it and ourselves. And after all, isn't that what all these contemporary policies like everyone being declared a winner, etc., are already doing? So this is perfectly in line with all that is going on already in child-rearing books and education and government policy. But hey: this is merely cosmetic, so what do you expect?)
(This plan illustrates the "redefine success to achieve success in difficult circumstances" issue I raised in my previous post about the Time Warner Center Statues. For another example, remember the constant redefinition of what victory in Iraq meant.)
