#7 Surfin' USA

So I’m watching TV the other night. And I’m doing what every red-blooded patriotic all-American male is doing. Channel surfing. And I stop for a moment on this program because all I see at first is this bevy of bulbous beige bellies. Oh no, I think, another expose on overweight America. I shift guiltily in my barcolounger, and as the leather makes that un-sticking noise that can only come from the peeling away of sweaty gelid thighs, I get a better hold on my remote and start to surf away. That’s when it dawns on me. I hit the mute button while I think it over. And of course hit is too strong a word. Hitting something would burn off more calories, all I really have to do is press a little button. All the work that TV watchers of earlier generations had to do when they changed a channel is taken care of by an invisible beam of infrared light. That’s right. That’s America’s dirty weight gain secret. It’s resting in the palm of my sweaty hand. The remote control. I press a button on the side of my barco and it shifts itself to upright, giving me a gentle assist to a vertical position. Even my loving chair is conspiring against me.
When you look at crowd pictures from the fifties compared to crowd pictures from today it’s immediately apparent that America is suffering from an epidemic of obesity. But are we really eating that much more? Heck no, we’re doing that much less. And doing less in little ways that add up to fewer burned calories. Think of it. It’s the little things. We used to dial a phone. Took a lot more energy that pressing buttons. We used to crank down the windows in our car. We used to fan ourselves in the summertime, actually push a lawn mower, hoe the weeds instead of spraying poison. When was the last time you got out of your car to open the garage door? Or stood at your sink and did a batch of dishes. Or, god forbid, actually cooked your food and cleaned up afterwards rather that swinging through the drive-thru and picking up a lo-cal burrito. It doesn’t matter how lo-cal your food is if you don’t find ways to burn the dang stuff off. People in the fifties didn’t jog. They got up off their couches and changed the channel. And they sure as heck didn’t kid themselves they were really doing something by calling it surfing. I don’t know about you, but last time I paddled out into the waves, climbed up onto my board, and spend my last ounce of energy keeping my balance riding the big one, I don’t remember taking my remote.
America, ya gotta love it.