Saturday, June 09, 2012

Soda Pop

Since I just left Brooklyn  nobody could give less of a shit what I think  everyone's been asking me what I think about Mayor Bloomberg's ban on over-sized sodas. It is, of course, one of those faux-libertarian spring-to-life moments, in which ABC is okay for the government to regulate, but not XYZ, and so on. There's no point in trying to debate it, people simply wanna cherry-pick what "rights" they have, and eventually any debate works itself back in the same way the Creationism one does, ie "okay so if the Biog Bang happened, who created the Big Bang?" and on and on. This fight is particularly laughable in that here we are insulted that the evil gub'ment wants to play nanny on us when it comes to sodas, and yet if there's one thing we have done as a country over the last 20 or so years is show how determined we are to lead the league in obesity, diabetes, healthcare costs and hearts exploding into ribbons before the age of 40.  We simply are incapable of facing the fact that when left to our own devices we basically act like idiots children, but I guess that's what makes us "Americans." You can't even make "conservatives" happy by pointing out the billions that will be saved with preventative health measures such as this, they'll still throw a hissy fit. I'm surprised Sniffy-Wiffy hasn't broomed her way into Manhattan and filled a swimming pool up with soda to show the gub'ment what it can do with it's thoughtful, pragmatic policies of saving lives and billions of future dollars, just like she did with cupcakes.

A better tact would be to do as Chris Rock once said about gun control: let everyone have all the guns they want, but make the bullets expensive as shit. Your fat kids want a coupla Pepsis? Great, that'll be $1,200 please. After all, it's the very people who are screeching bloody murder about the gub'ment trying to tell them how much soda they can shove in their gullets that rather ironically don't seem to mind that it's the ta-DA! federal government that subsidizes sugar so that it's so insanely cheap in the first place. See how this shit goes in circles?

2 comments:

Pops said...

They actually subsidize corn, which is why high fructose corn syrup is used in everything from soda to ketchup to almost everything else that is sweetened. Your point is still valid, though. :)

Anonymous said...

Oh come on now! Such a sophmoric, simplistic "solution" to obesity. Banning large sodas. This reminds me of lame duck Rudy speaking of a crackdown against jaywalkers. Pols get bored.

Do you really think this will do anything to alleviate obesity? Do you not see the slippery slope ahead of you?

Eating like a pig is a choice. People like it. Good grief.