Is Georgia's Anti-Obesity Campaign a Form of Bullying? - Weight Loss Center - Everyday Health
FRIDAY, Jan. 6, 2012 — The Georgia anti-childhood obesity campaign featuring overweight children has been called shocking and sparked heated debate across the country. Now it has attracted the attention of the National Eating Disorder Association (NEDA), who has equated the advertisements to bullying.
“Every day we hear about the terrible rise in bullying within our schools, yet this ad campaign could actually promote and give permission to such behaviors among kids,” Lynn Grefe, president and CEO of NEDA, said in a press release. “Sadly, these ads will be successful in shaming children with weight problems and their parents, but will do nothing to promote and educate about wellness and emotional well-being. Shame on [...]
Well, if these ads get pulled, then the meth ads will have to be pulled or we're condoning bullying of addicts. People familiar with meth and it's effects tell me that those ads are the truth of what happens all too often, and that they should remain on the air. Bullying is never cool, and bullies suck, but sometimes the truth hurts and we need to start differentiating between telling the truth and being mean (and, we need to stop thinking that the only appropriate form of honesty is brutal; yes, our collective social head is buried in the sand over many issues and it can take a blow from a 2x4 to get anything through to us, but if we start being gentler with one another we'll learn to hear gentle criticisms before they need to be stated harshly). It's not always fun when we're faced with our own poor choices (and the choices others would have us make aren't always going to be the right ones for us), but if we can learn to listen and hear and take in what may be being offered, and if we can learn that when people choose not to hear us they probably have their reasons for that, and if we can take critiques in the spirit in which they're offered (which isn't always positive, but knowing that someone offers something from a negative place is as valuable as understanding that they may be coming from a caring place), we'll each have better individual results and as a result society as a whole will be a better place to live. Yes, there are a lot of fat kids, and they, their parents, and society are all to blame for that. There are a lot of fat adults too, and the older we get the more the responsibility lies on our own shoulders for addressing it where it's an issue. Who's to blame doesn't matter. What matters is that people find healthy places for themselves (kids and adults) where they can comfortably exist in their own bodies, do the things they want to do, see who they want to see when they look at themselves. It's sad to see shame being used, yet again, to try to change behavior (it'll work short-term for a lotta people, but in the long-term it is always, ALWAYS destructive), but hopefully it'll open a dialogue in which people who don't struggle with weight issues can come to better understand those who do, and why they do, and we can learn how to apply that to our own lives and our own issues, since we all have them (which is why shame is always destructive, since at some point the fingers we point at others start to poke us in our own eyes and then we all just feel like a buncha failures for all the stuff we're doin' wrong instead of seeing ourselves as humans who do a lot right in any given day, and maybe have some behaviors we think it might be a good idea to change).
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