I didn't know if I was going to write tonight or not, but now it looks like I'm gonna. Heath Ledger died today and I was torn between mentioning it, not mentioning it, or just not writing. I guess I'll just say it is tragic and unexpected and move on.

The other topic that moved me to write was an article I saw on msn. I know, try to hold back your shock. The article is titled "Obesity Surgery May Cure Diabetes" and is found here http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/22787261/ Now, before you get irritated and close me down for ranting about obesity in America again I promise my problems aren't what you would think. Well, they are but not wholly.

It's become a pet peeve of mine that article titles strive to hook the readers, often with false information. The article labeling the new strain of staph as the new "gay disease" did it and now so does this one. In both articles it is clarified, in this case that the surgery doesn't cure all diabetes only particular types and that the study (which isn't much of a study yet) shows people who've undergone the surgery are five times more likely to cease needing diabetes medications than those participating in dietary plans. That's a lot different than surgery curing diabetes.

This bothers me because, frankly, the surgery bothers me. I consider Victorian women having ribs removed to make their waists look smaller, needing fainting couches because their corsets were too tight, Chinese women binding their feet and other beauty fads and wonder how history will look on our modern society of plastic surgery and obesity surgery. On the one hand I understand why the extremely obese might opt for surgery and even why it might be helpful or necessary. On the other hand it is mutilation of a body and that never sits well with me.

Often after having the surgery patients can't eat--subsisting on protein shakes for days they eventually move up to small portions of food that are very controlled as their stomach won't tolerate normal American-fare anymore. Perhaps to those who see fat people losing weight this all seems like a wonderful thing and I'm not arguing the principle of the matter, but the reality...what is truly accomplished by looking to surgery so quickly and completely? What does it mean that we would rather cut ourselves open and reform our stomachs than work with what we have? What does it mean that we would rather pay for one single operation that forces weight loss on the fat than offer acceptance of their obesity?

It's a simple question of self-mutilation. When I was a teenager I used to dream of the day they would invent a pill I could take that would turn me into Jessica Rabbit. Wouldn't that be spectacular I thought to myself? If I could just take a pill that would make my body what it was supposed to be then all the hot guys in high school would want me, and then I would be loved, and then I wouldn't be unhappy. Well now they've done it. It's not a pill, but it's almost as good. The only problem is, after surgery you have to be willing to starve for a little while until, like an anorexic, you are no longer hungry much of the time. Why the surgery? Why not just put the obese on the diet prescribed to post surgery patients? Because without cutting up the stomach it isn't doable? What does that tell us? What does that mean for how we're treating the patients?

In the end, what I'm getting at is this: we accept that the people who are marginalized are the cause of all our society's ills--the fat, the smokers, the immigrants. To that end we support whole-heartedly whatever our society does to deal with these problem-causing miscreants--loss of civil rights, mutilation, deportation. But we never stop to wonder if everything we're told is true, or if those we hate are just convenient targets. What has a fat person done to you lately really? Been unattractive? Sat next to you on a plane? Eaten your baby? Smokers I get, walking into a smoky restaurant is annoying and hard on non-smokers, sometimes even on fellow smokers. But what about bars that want to include smoking? What about people that like smoking or don't mind places where people smoke? We let the KKK gather peaceably, why can't smokers? And when is the last time you lost a job because an illegal immigrant swooped in and stole it from you? There you were, just dying for that phone call from MacDonald's but instead you stopped by and saw Paco sweeping out behind what should have been your counter! That's what I thought.

But hey, it's cool. Fat people need intervention or they wouldn't be fat, so the surgery is a good thing. And every dollar they cost the insurance company is a dollar you could have saved. But to that I have to ask, is that the fat person's fault, or the insurance companies? Is so much easier to hate and blame each other than it is to accept responsibility. This society we've created, this place that worships the holy dollar--is it really what we all thought it was when we were kids? Is anything really okay so long as it's "just business"? When did people cease to carry worth that couldn't be measured in loss/profits?