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Where Do the Children Play?
By David Glenn Cox
America is the land of a myriad mazes of madness; morbid, moralizing, mendacious mediators moderating, minimizing the missive while making the miniscule mighty meteors with mixed metaphors of our societal mental malaise.
In Santa Clara County, California, Board Supervisor Ken Yeager wants to ban toys in Happy Meals. "One in three kids are overweight or are obese, and we're finding out more and more that if you're obese as a child, you're going to have health problems your entire life," says Yeager. You know, I hope that I live long enough to someday be able to see my mind cleared of all the pressing issues of the day, war, poverty, environmental degradation and the economic deforestation of the American work force. Then, perhaps, I could take a whole day to get down to the very serious business of banning toys in Happy Meals.
It’s not that I underestimate childhood obesity, but it works like this: McDonalds puts toys in Happy Meals to attract children into their restaurants (in the broadest definition of the word). Little Magpie and Milton whine in the backseat of the minivan until Mom or Milton Senior decides to take the family for lunch at McDonalds. I was fortunate enough to miss the Happy Meal phenomenon but I remember McDonalds from childhood as that place we drove by on our way home for lunch.
That was a special time in America, where whining in the backseat of the old man's Chrysler might earn you not a Happy Meal but instead a “Be quiet before I give you something in your mouth you can’t chew!” This was a generation in charge and unafraid, where food was food and entertainment was entertaining and a county supervisor wanting to ban toys in Cracker Jacks would have been considered entertainment.
The drug company AstraZeneca has agreed to settle a federal investigation to the tune of $520 million for illegally marketing its schizophrenia drug, Seroquel. It’s called off-branding or off-labeling, where drug salesmen push drugs on physicians for an illness they are not approved for use in. In fact it’s legal for your doctor to prescribe Viagra for a broken leg as a stiffener. If a drug representative tries a stunt like that then it’s off to troubleville. AstraZeneca still faces 25,000 lawsuits for wrongful death and injury because of Seroquel.
Seroquel is an anti-psychotic drug that costs four dollars per pill and is taken twice a day. It is designed for adults and children who watch Sponge Bob Square Pants with the TV set turned off. That market is very small so it was marketed for dementia in the elderly and all the new diseases of American childhood, bipolar disorder, phobias and depression. A 1997 study showed users of Seroquel gained on average eleven pounds a year and had an increased risk of developing diabetes. It’s like McDonalds in a pill! In the elderly the risk of diabetes was moderated somewhat by the drug's ability to cause sudden death.
America is the home of mud wrestling and monster trucks so we must excuse Mr. Yeager for his failure to prioritize. That’s not our strong suit in America. I was in a fast food restaurant a few months back and there was a woman with three small kids. When her order was rung up it came to twenty-two eighteen and she was standing there with a twenty dollar bill in her hand. She blustered momentarily and then said, “That’s too expensive!” She grabbed up the kids and left but it was obvious to all that she didn’t have the two eighteen. Maybe she had food at home and maybe she didn’t. Maybe the power was turned off or the gas or maybe she’d been evicted and was just trying to do something nice for her kids.
It ain’t much, a toy from a happy meal, but if it keeps the kids happy for thirty minutes or an hour that’s a soothing medicine for an injured parent. Perhaps Mr. Yeager can take on the cause of the millions of Americans down to their last twenty dollars. That is a cause that seems to me to have merit in it rather than taking toys from the hands of children to fight obesity. The road to hell is paved with good intentions and a poor diet will cause just as many health problems as a fatty one. Parents not being able to properly care for their children causes more problems than all the Happy Meal toys ever made.
But this is America, God damn it! We've got cable TV and a copy of the Complete Works of William Shakespeare propping up that busted leg of the sofa so we can get a better view of Law & Order or CSI where every neighbor is a serial killer and every man standing on the corner waiting for the bus is actually a pedophile. Let’s call it feartainment; keep your children inside as bad people are everywhere. Domestic terrorists, priests, pedophiles and perverts make us keep one eye fixed on the TV and the other on the double bolted front door keeping parks and playgrounds empty.
We are a good people, right? Except for all the domestic terrorists, priests, pedophiles and perverts. We always do what’s right. Mr. Yeager might be a bit of a goof but he’s a well-intentioned goof. Why, this country led an invasion to overthrow the brutal Saddam and even if UN sanctions led to the deaths of thousands of children, the end justified the means. Saddam is gone and now Iraq can flourish under the new leadership of quislings, warlords and tribal thugs.
The fear of Saddam has been replaced by the check from Uncle Sam, the sucker who pays them all to not shoot at our troops anymore. The children of Iraq have health problems as well. In 1989 the rate of birth defects in southern Iraq was 11 per 100,000 births. By 2001, after the first Gulf War and exposure to depleted uranium, the number grew to 116 per 100,000 births. There were infants born without brains or spines, born with organs outside their bodies. That was the first Gulf War; in the second Gulf War to free these people from Saddam’s tyranny the US military used DU munitions all over the country. The cancer rate nationwide is soaring just as it is soaring in Bosnia and Serbia and Kosovo, places where DU munitions were also dropped.
Let’s stop deluding ourselves. As Mr. Yeager worries about plastic dinosaurs in Happy Meals, the state of California is preparing to lay off 26,000 schoolteachers. But where do plastic dinosaurs come from? From petroleum and the President has decided that he agrees with Sarah Palin. Drill, baby, drill! That policy took a serious hit when an oil well off the Louisiana coast blew up and sank killing eleven men.
The well has been belching out a thousand gallons an hour ever since, going on five days now. BP has been working with underwater submersibles to try and manually release a 450-ton weight called a blowout preventer, which sits atop the wellhead. Is it just me or is the device poorly named? I mean, it's been five days and the oil slick is now 48 by 39 miles wide so the word preventer just doesn’t seem to sit right. The company argues that it is far more complex because it has never been used 5,000 feet down before.
Well, as Mark Twain said, “All you need say is that Adam was a man, that is enough.” It is always so with the works of man, some wrinkle not thought of defeating years of safety research. Reading about the blowout preventer made me think of Obama’s other idea for new energy. The next generation of nuclear plants that will have water vessels above the reactor as blowout preventers as well, and they, too, are guaranteed safe. A European environmental group has said that the Chernobyl explosion has killed as many as one million people worldwide since the accident in 1986.
Is it really the toys in Happy Meals threatening our children? Are the scary people who threaten our children’s future in raincoats or in Washington?
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