NANNY STATE IN IT’S WORST
“The true danger is when liberty is nibbled away, for expedience, and by parts.” – Edmund Burke, Irish-born British statesman, parliamentary orator, and political thinker (1729 -1797)
Dr. David Ludwig, Harvard University child obesity expert came up with a “brilliant” idea to take obese children away from their parents and toss these kids into the-so-imperfect foster care system.
According to Dr. Ludwig, state intervention can be the best way to save extremely obese children. However, he completely dismisses the known cases of physical, sexual and emotional abuse of children in the foster care. He also dismisses the importance of family ties and children’s emotional attachment to their parents.
Yes, obesity is a big problem, but this radical suggestion to deprive parents of their parental rights, sounds as one of the worst examples of the nanny state. Dr. Ludwig puts government interests to save money on physical health care over children’s emotional stability. This idea looks as custom-made for the healthcare reform which was rammed into the American peoples’ throats in March 2010.
What if another scholar addresses that it is unhealthy for children’s vulnerable minds to be raised in the families with certain political or religious views, and therefore they must be taken away from their parents’ influence? (“Give us the child for 8 years and it will be a Bolshevik forever”, said Lenin, communist and first leader of the Soviet Union.)
It is not up to a village to raise a child, unless it is a communist commune or a Nazi program created by Heinrich Himmler, a leading member of the Nazi Party. The goal of the latter was to set up special homes for racially ‘clean’ unmarried Aryan pregnant women, in order to create ‘Master Race’. Many children born in those homes had been raised without knowing their parent(s), and sent to adoptive or foster Nazi families. When becoming adults, these children had been relentlessly searching for their biological parents and family roots.
I also see Dr. Ludwig’s idea to take away obese children from their homes as an attack on the American exceptionalism. Freedom and liberties we, Americans, have been enjoying, make our country exceptional. However, some academics and politicians are pushing their idea of transforming the US into a European-style nanny state country, where people pay big taxes, while the government re-distributes wealth and spends taxpayers’ money, as well as dictates people how to behave in many aspects of life.
If you start giving up your freedom and rights (including parental rights) piece by piece, some day you will find yourself as being one of the many faceless persons lacking individualism and happiness.
As for the obesity cure – it is not about the portion size served in a fast food restaurant or the amount of sugar in a can of soda. In the first place, it is about persons’ set of mind and education level. Education is power, and scholars should think about how to educate people on healthy life styles, versus punishing parents using the unlimited government authority. And the healthy family unit preservation should be primary.
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