Fat Brat

I'm not particularly well acquainted with the Fat Brats issue; it crops up from time to time with bored journalists and low ranking politicians on the make collude to bring the issue into the harsh light of day. It crops up here, it crops up back home, it crops up usually in the context of coming a distant second to the US of A in the Fat Stakes.

It even crops up in France but there usually in the context of Imperial America's malign influence and specifically the spread of Macdonalds, the rise of the anglo-saxon work 'ethic', the invention of the microwave oven and the appearance of ready 'meals' on the shelves of expedient supermarkets. There fat is only a side dish at a banquet of cultural collapse accompanied by wailing, hand wringing and the gnashing of teeth. Then they turn around and elect Sarko, which just proves that there's absolutely no point whatsoever in attempting to understand the French.

We've got her to almost ten years of age without having even the slightest reason to be concerned about her weight. She's neither an anaemic-looking stick insect nor plausible double for a beached whale but rather something balanced well between those two extremes.

In fact, I can only think of one truly and clearly damagingly obese child at her school. He's so grotesquely overweight he cannot walk properly. Such is the quantity of blubber in which his short thighs are enveloped he can only propel himself forward by swinging each leg round. This gait is often characterise as a waddle, but I suspect it is physiologically more destructive than that.

He has a younger sibling, but that child is yet to emerge from the push chair and it isn't yet possible to tell whether this child is going the way of its brother. I've never seen a man with the mother or the children and they lives in social housing. I have seen her in the convenience store late at night (and by that I mean at 10pm or later) being dragged about the place by her older child. I've seen them in the morning making their way to school on foot. I've seen her walking him home at night.

I almost never see him without food in his mouth and that food is inevitably highly processes, full of chemicals and lacking almost entirely nutritional value. I'm trying to think how many years now I've been watching them, and I'm guesstimating four. In those years he has bloated and become increasingly bullying towards his mother who is quite sweet-faced if manifestly inept. He lumbers along beside her, intermittently wheezing and demanding. Before he's ten he'll be a veritable monster unless someone intervenes to detoxify him, educate his mother and possibly pshyco-analyse her out of whatever is driving her to kill her child.

Why should we support the state intervening? Because the state already does. The state intervened the minute it allowed this young woman to leave formal education without any life skills, when it allowed her to believe she could procreate without any responsibility for that act, when it provided her with money and goods in kind to support her in that belief, when it provided medical care for life on demand and free of all obvious cost to the end user.

When the state creates monsters by creating an environment in which they can emerge and thrive then it is reasonble to expect the state to clean up its mess. So why do I want to rip the entire edifice of welfare down and leave people like this to drown?