IN this day of political correctness, where we have emboldened the immoral, where right is wrong and wrong is right, where a gay person can humiliate the hell out the accuser to the point of apology, where a Minister in all common sense has been involved in a moral infraction, with impunity I must add, and where a Minister who has lost her fire, tells us that “the Cabinet of ministers knows how she feels about the situation” forgetting that she is responsible to the people, where a Prime Minister on one side of his tongue tells us that we have lost our moral bearings and when the opportunity presents itself to make an example of the dishonourable, tells us we have to wait on the judgement of the court, I have to tell you Saint Lucia, your children are fat; they’re obese and that ain’t healthy.
Okay, maybe it’s just my eyes playing tricks on me, maybe it’s not me seeing that our children are like air-filled balloons ready to pop. Maybe I do not see the obsession for hormone injected foreign chicken. Maybe it’s not me being aware that all what is sold in the school canteen is junk.
These days, we celebrate fatness selling the deception of being fabulously and generously proportionate. Of course this goes to our women. I don’t see anyone celebrating the bulbous male.
Our children have become very inactive. Our parents are happy to feed their children fast food day in and day out, no time to prepare a decent meal for family consumption.
Our children are being baby-sitted by computer tablets. No more cricket in the road, we make ample use of our Xbox. Have you not seen some of our police officers? They could not give chase to a heavy roller on road moving at zero miles per hour.
I do not teach anymore but I am sure that those who have spent a lifetime in the profession would have noticed the change in mass of their classroom.
I have lamented before that we have made some reforms in our Food and Nutrition curriculum which I do not think have worked ideally for our Caribbean context. We are becoming too American in everything we do. Shameful we have not embraced our own; our colour, our traditional knowledge, our history.
There will be a lot of stresses on our health system in time to come; diabetes, obesity and hearing loss. All our young men have these loud deafening sound systems in their vehicles. They cannot be thinking that it will not harm them in the long run.
Our men are an endangered species in case we have not noticed. And just in case we have not yet noticed our children are too fat. Parents be aware. The relevant authorities take not.