Your Tax Dollars at Work: Telling Kids to Do Jumping Jack During TV Commercials
In case you are happy, here's something that should make you sad: The taxpayer-funded website for Let's Move!, the signature project of First Lady Michelle Obama that's designed to get a nation of junior lard-asses off the couch (I was reminded of the program's existence thanks to a PSA on Nicktoons).
From the site's Fun Ways to Break Up TV Time entry:
… Quiet time for reading and homework is fine, but you should limit time spent watching TV, playing video games or surfing the web so you have more time to play!
If you're going to watch TV or play computer games, break it up! Pause the game. Make commercial breaks Let's Move! breaks. Here are some active and fun ideas:
- Jumping jacks
- Dancing
- Racing up and down the stairs
- Sit-ups
- Stretching
- Jogging in place
- Push-ups
- Active house chores
- Come up with your own activities and share them with friends and family
I realize that the budget for the Let's Move! site is a rounding error on the backside of a pimple on the backside of the guy who cleans a Pershing Missile and all that, but simply because something is relatively cheap doesn't mean it should be given a free pass. Maybe it's the fact that we just celebrated the nation's birthday, or that it's like 100 degrees everywhere that matters to me, or that a million people are without electricity, or that my blood sugar is spiking or dropping (must…do…jumping…jacks…) or that I can't shake the feeling today is Saturday and so resent being stuck at work. Did I mention it's like 100 degrees?
But in the wake of record-setting deficits (that show no sign of ending any time soon) and idiot screeds about how individualism is a cancer on the body politic and two major-party presidential candidates who stink on ice worse than the Columbus Blue Jackets, well, stuff like Let's Move! (is the exclamation point really necessary?) just fills my heart with more sadness than the saddest song and the stiffest codeine-laced cough syrup I can imagine.
Read Greg Beato's classic exhumation of President Kennedy's cortisone-addled response to news that Swiss kids were in better shape than American tubbos back in the early 1960s.
