Water…Not Just For Flushing
link Soda Wars: Michelle Obama tells kids to drink water | WashingtonExaminer.com.
I suppose it’s a noble thing to use your position of influence to persuade others to do good things. Issues and conditions that affect many people but which require financial support to ameliorate are worthwhile causes. Jerry Lewis has been associated with the Muscular Dystrophy cause for decades and of course Pamela Anderson has been linked to PETA. World hunger, AIDS, etc etc etc all have their champions. When Nancy Reagan was the First Lady, she took it upon herself to fight drug use via the famous “Just Say No” campaign.
It gets increasingly harder to find worthwhile causes that haven’t been associated with celebrities. Michelle Obama finds herself in this pickle and so initially decided to wage a war on fat, especially among kids. The first pass was to introduce, actually mandate the creation of legumes and veggies onto school lunch menus. Yum! Oddly, children weren’t particularly fond of arugula and carrot sticks…go figure.
As this campaign is as successful as the humus dip at a Denny’s, a logical idea then was to make success easier to achieve. How about the idea of drinking…water! It would be much easier to point to statistics that will eventually show that the program was working, kids are drinking water! We do have some reservations about getting kids to buy into this though. Smart Alecs will say “Water? that’s the stuff they flush toilets with!”. No doubt there will be expensive public service campaigns expounding the virtues of drinking water with accompanying instructions on how to do it properly. Let’s see, right hand on tap, turn clockwise…do not overfill! Pamphlets will be distributed in schools and billboards created to ensure maximum exposure. Facebook pages will be created on which you can “like” water. As an accompaniment, there will also be supplementary instructions on other confusing things that children may need help with.
Breathing for example: techniques for proper air ingestion. Let’s not forget walking instructions. There will be discussions on the necessity of alternating feet.
I hereby wish to contribute my suggestion for how to tackle the devastating issues of child obesity and water consumption simultaneously.
Let’s remove all water faucets from homes. Let’s direct water only to large cisterns that regionally serve communities. To get water, children must walk some arbitrary distance, let’s say 2 miles, to carry buckets of water back to the home for consumption. In many African countries, they are way ahead of us on this. We combine exercise with utility, sheer genius. Have you ever seen a fat African kid? Sometimes the old ways are the best.
Next: breathing in and out. And walking tips, is it necessary to alternate feet?