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About The Battalion. (College Station, Tex.) 1893-current | View Entire Issue (March 30, 1998)
The Battalion [onday • March 30, 1998 TATE OF THE UNION trouble for the Twinkles ; roposed junk food tax infringes on Americans’right to feeding themselves with fat .4 Donny Ferguson columnist merica, you re too fat. Not only are you fat, $re too stupid to do about it.” Blunt that is the mental- 5ehind the newest fad he Health Police — “Fat Tax.” Allknowing, all-car- slcial engineering •■counters like Yale chologist Kelly D. wiu'll and graduate dent E. Katherine Battle want to tax junk Jd,(subsidize healthy food and regulate . fir sugary cereals, snacks and other virjjoally-enhanced munchies. Ton see, Americans aren’t pudgy because a. actually like to eat Ding-Dongs and a Skit- and whipped cream pizza, we’re portly be- se i) we can afford to eat fatty food, and b) re loo stupid to know any better, inter the “Fat Tax.” Inspired by the public tiins and social engineering success of the yhooed War on Tobacco, those just to the oljtobaccophobes are hell-bent on impos- thcir granola-munching, sweatin’-to-the- ies lifestyle on those of us Whataburger kars know by name. fhey don’t want a nation of Roger Eberts, ry Whites and Liz Taylors who can buy lent whatever they want, they want to Id a nation of Kate Mosses and Susan vt^rs by careful manipulation of our col- dve pudgy pocketbooks. Hopefully, President Clinton will take ac- i against the Fat Tax and back up his actual Estatement, “I don’t necessarily regard Me na Id’s as junk food. They have salads.” ||5iving government the ability to regulate our daily diets raises some scary questions. Just how far can they go in enforcing the Fat Tax? Will we see headlines like, “Agents Raid Home of Marlon Brando, Seize 400 Kilos of Snickers” and “Mayor McCheese Nabbed in FBI Tax Sting?” Can government really meddle in the everyday habits of its citizens? What began with an attack on tobacco has grown into a war on junk food. The two oper ate on the same premise, Americans are enjoy ing themselves with a product detrimental to their health and something must be done to stop it. Although the assaults on smokers played well in the media, the spaced-out war on snackers has exposed the health police for what they are: meddling do-gooders overstep ping the boundaries of government control. As long as they are turning the government into a national nanny, proponents of the Fat Tax should go the whole nine yards. We need a Mediocrity Tax to raise prices on John Tesh CDs and Denver Nuggets tickets. Af ter all, someone could easily produce a study showing children who are repeatedly exposed to inferior music and poor outside shooting grow up with lowered expectations. Hiking prices on Spice Girls tickets and charging a hefty fee to watch CBS program ming is the only way to save the children. A world plagued by lower-back pain needs a Bad Shoe Tax. Everyone knows Big Shoe has covered up the health risks of bad soles and marketed their products at innocent children with slick Joe-Camel-like techniques like naming them “Hush Puppies” to exploit kids’ love of cartoon animals. Americans should be taxed to the point where we all must walk around in nothing but Easy Spirits and those brown clodhoppers they sell in the back of Eckerd’s. If Fat Taxers give government the power to regulate what we put in our mouths, our lives will be forever changed for the worse. If government were to seize full control of the snack food industry, buying a nine-pack of McNuggets could require lengthy paper work and a cost-benefit analysis. The Trix Rabbit could be hauled in front of a Senate committee to testify on sugary cereal and its effect on obsessive- compulsive disorders. Most importantly, we should tax obses sion with power. By making people who want to tax to bacco, junk food and restrict other free doms pay higher prices on office space, phone rates and supplies, the rest of us can get on with our lives without looking over our shoulder for a bureaucrat or whiny “public interest” activist wailing about it. The Fat Tax proposed by pointy-headed, croissant-munching, do-gooder intellectu als has taken the absurdities of government regulation of health habits and thrust it into the spotlight. If government could successfully manage anything, tax preparation wouldn’t require a NASCAR pit crew-like team of lawyers and accountants and Social Security wouldn’t be in worse financial shape than an Amish computer company. After 200 years of fighting oppression, winning two world wars, becoming the planet’s leading superpower and inventing arena football, Americans have earned the right to eat whatever they want, no matter how sugaiy, fatty, gooey or whatever the nugent-to-caramel ratio. Donny Ferguson is a junior political science major. RSPECTIVES m (ids are society's responsibility m Jf Michelle Voss columnist IF ;oiuchil- mio vio- K, and do not 'e. Afew Ago, a Ty Isas I was doa rrilii nightmare when a grue- ae shooting at an Arkansas mid- tschool killed five people and in- fed 10. What is shocking, however, ha i the suspects in custody for ^ shooting are two adolescent | one is 11, and the other is 13. j'essed in camouflage and armed jjprifles and pistols, the boys led the school’s fire alarm, then I neighboring woods, fired over shots at students and faculty. After- s, the boys were found running |rd a van stocked with more guns imunition. It is becoming painfully obvious it we are neglecting our children. K Arkansas Governor Mike ckabee aptly stated, “It makes me mot so much at individual Iren that have done it as much Bigry at a world in such a thing 1 happen.” pr society is not progressing i our children are committing brutal acts of violence. Our society is not civilized when our children kill. The fact that the two words “chil dren” and “kill” are found in the same sentence should be enraging. Why didn’t someone know these boys had a van full of ammunition and weapons? Why didn’t some one sense they were acting pecu liar? Why wasn’t someone listen ing to these children? We cannot rely on our public school system to be the answer to these questions, they are miserably failing to reach out to our children. The simple fact is, we are not giving our children the attention they need — at home. Some may call it a decay of fam ily values — whatever that means. Some might say feminism is to blame, since fewer mothers stay home — that’s just being overly simplistic. Others might point to our vio lence-saturated media as a catalyst for violent behavior — but that’s just a scapegoat. America has a national crisis, and we do not care. Regardless of the label one might use to explain our national crisis, it all boils down to the fact we have a lack of love for our children. But rather than take on responsi bility as individuals and communities to give more of ourselves to our chil dren, we have created partisan issues. Partisan issues that serve as campaign platforms and fuel con gressional debates, all to no avail, our children are still suffering. Pitting conservative against lib eral on issues such as national child care or national standard ized testing, we think in terms of budgets, popularity ratings and reelection campaigns. We forget about our children. Yet, we, our generation, will be starting families soon. We have the chance to actually change something for the better in America, we can be there for our children. We can shake the American ad diction to materialism by forsaking the BMW and the ritzier neighbor hood so one parent can stay home with tlie children to discipline and to listen, to know what is happen ing in their lives. Otherwise, we will begin to fear our own children. We are not a just society when we rob our youth of love and nurturing. This is not the job of the state, and we will decay as a culture if we allow our government to raise our children. We must realize our future will be bleak if we neglect our children. We cannot allow chaos to be our children’s care giver. Michelle Voss is a sophomore English major. Nfeluctoith REWEMBiR, he goes J PERSPECTIVES Entertainment not cause of tragedy C Beverly Mireles columnist I hildren screaming. Blood flowing. Lives ending. It sounded like a report com ing from Bosnia, or Rwanda, or any other country that Ameri cans routinely ignore. But some thing happened that Americans couldn’t ignore like they had the all the others. Because it oc curred on our own soil — some thing happened at an elemen tary school in Jonesboro, Ark. Fifteen people were serious ly wounded, and tragically, five people — four stu dents and a teacher who threw herself in front of the group in order to shield them. They were victims of a seemingly motiveless crime. I first heard this horrible information while watching CNN. The news anchors repeatedly re ferred to the boys as snipers. But they were children, just like those they murdered were children. Then, the news anchors cut to the footage of the scene. It first showed the sheriff. He cried as he re counted what had happened. Pain showed in every crease on his face. Sorrow swam in his eyes. The witnesses were visible behind him, slowly rocking back and forth, still in shock. Some had blood smeared on their clothes and hands. A few looked out into the surrounding area, but it was clear that they weren’t seeing anything. They were reliving it all, mentally. One of the officers was wrapping yellow “Do Not Cross” tape around the school’s brick pillars. Yellow police tape gives everything the impression of being “off”; it casts the look of disaster. But it looked partic ularly painful on the elementary school. After seeing file footage a few times, as CNN cy cled the story over and over for the rest of the night, something close to anger swept over me. I wasn’t particularly angry at the two boys, more confused to wards them, but I was angry that something like this happened — at a school no less — and that everyday life had once again been thrown into chaos because of a crime without reason. Perhaps I was just searching for answers. Every one was. The next day, the governor of Arkansas blamed “a national culture of violence fueled by film and television” for the boys’ murderous impulse. It didn’t really matter if he was right, it was good poli tics in a time of moral crisis. People were looking for something to blame, and those entertainments we find so delightful on a normal basis seem foul under the limelight of tragedy. Blaming doesn’t seem to help, though. This is the fourth killing by children/adolescents in the past two years — if movies are truly the problem, the solution to end all this madness is found easily enough. But they aren’t to blame, we are. Lack of humanity does not come from watching television, or movies, or whatever is the fashionable scapegoat these days. It comes from replacing human emotions with tele vised ones. It comes from making the peripheries of life, like TV and movies, the mainstays. Maybe “Must See TV” isn’t to blame, but our fascination is. We are the ones who made fiction more impor tant that nonfiction. It’s the reason why people can watch the evening news without flinching, and yet be moved by a “tragic” episode of “ER.” Being angry at the entertainment industry is very easy, but it isn’t effective against tragedies of this magnitude. And as those boys sit in a juvenile deten tion center, a painful reminder of how murderously cruel we can be to each other, politicians and the rest of us should keep in mind that TV can’t cause this kind of damage, only people can. Beverly Mireles is a freshman Microbiology major. MAIL CALL Aggie hospitality appreciated by visitor I have heard a great deal about Texas A&M, about its traditions and its history. However, since I am not a student here, I have nev er quite understood the way peo ple revere A&M. I came here for spring break and was shown the Chicken, Kyle Field and most im portantly ... the Bird. The people said Howdy to me and I have been really impressed with your school. When at the Bird for the first of several times to come, I left my purse with all my important be longings and a great deal of cash. It wasn’t until late that night that I realized it was missing. When I called my parents in Kansas, I dis covered that a member of the Corps of Cadets had found my purse and had notified them. James Eagleeye arranged to meet me and returned the purse with out accepting the reward. James saved my trip and for this, I want to thank him and extend my sin cere gratitude. I still don’t understand all of your traditions. I hear “whoop” and talk of “good bull,” and I don’t think I’ll ever catch on. But I do know the students on this campus are friendly, honest and proud of their school. I think you have a great deal to be proud of. Cate Pugh University of Kansas Class of'99 Line-item veto not the problem, President is I can see how Stewart Patton can come to believe the line-item veto is ineffective. It can be difficult to dis tinguish the line-item veto’s ineffec tiveness from President Clinton’s in effectiveness. My advice: keep the policy, lose the President. Eva Darski Class of'98 The Battalion encourages letters to the ed itor. Letters must be 300 words or less and In clude the author’s name, class, and phone number. The opinion editor reserves the right to edit letters for length, style, and accuracy. Letters may be submitted in person at 013 Reed Mc Donald with a valid student ID. Letters may also be mailed to: The Battalion - Mail Call 013 Reed McDonald Texas A&M University College Station, TX 77843-1HI Campus Mail: 111.1 Fax: (409) 845-2647 E-mail: batt@unix.tamu.edu