Let Them Eat Fries

So I guess its time to get past the appetizers and into some meat!!

Let Them Eat Fries

I saw "Little Miss Sunshine" last weekend for the first time and thoughts have been nagging me ever since. First off let me say that I enjoyed it, thought it was a cute little movie. It occurred to me while watching it how ironic it was that this film got so much buzz from such a superficial and condescending community as Hollywood. Either that Hollywood is getting some semblance of a conscience.

Not the kind of conscience that comes from making a movie that brings about a movement or propels a wrong into the societal consciousness but the kind of conscience that tries to dispense of the lessons it brings us on the silver screen every chance it gets. The lesson that men and women need to fit into some kind of norm to be deemed attractive. To me this movie, or film if you prefer, condemns the lessons that one must be young, thin and attractive; exactly the lessons that Hollywood has been trying to convey for the last 50 years. And hey kids, we've got no problem with that, do we?

Oh we say we do, but you've seen it haven't you? The mother or father at the grocery store telling her kids that they can't have something because it'll make them fat or the guys at the gym making fun of somebody coming in for the first time calling them a 'cow' or a 'pig'. F----ing genius' these guys, whose entire existence revolves around how many steroids they can ingest and how big they can get before the heart damage becomes irreversable. These are the people who are the best judges of a person, parents who think their child's appearance reflects on them negatively or gym rats whose greatest accomplishment in life is breaking the 300 lb. mark on the bench press, and and we have allowed it to become so.

Hell, we've come to expect it, even accept and facilitate it. "Please god, don't let my daughter be fat, anything but that"-I think some people would rather their child be abducted by Bigfoot rather than have their own existence marred by the emotional strain of having an overweight child or even worse, one that is unattractive as defined by societal norms. We were always told as children that beauty comes from within? When then did the rules change and the motherf---ers in charge become the real life models for the Barbie and Ken dolls.

We take them to McDonald's, order them a happy meal and then chastise them for eating it. We throw them cheese puffs and cola and then blame the school cafeteria for contributing to the childhood obesity epidemic. We throw them in front of the TV with video games and DVDs and then wonder why they are failing PE. We create for them a sedentary life and then condemn them for living it.

Well as long as we can blame someone else, thank god it's not on our own conscience.

I haven't even started on the well-meaning parents and family members who harp on a child carrying a little extra tonnage so much that their only recourse is to hide in the closet until the twinkies they stash behind their stuffed animals become more important to them than having any self-esteem. These folks coupled with, of course, the do-gooder parents who force their opinions on their children so hard that they either become complacent conformists or societal f---ups.

We didn't have this problem 50 years ago kids. We ate ding-dongs and drank tang and real cola. We played outside, read books, and used our imaginations. Our parents made our dinners, eating out was a treat and all it took for a movie to get an R rating was to have the verbal content of this post, sans dashes. Back then we were taught to form our own opinions, think for ourselves and to not be held back by anything.

Wake up kids, the lives our parents left for us to screw up our own lives and we are becoming more screwed up than they could have ever dreamed . . . can you hear them giggling? We've created psychobabble to explain away any inadequacies we've created and where we couldn't we've even found a way to project blame on others. Sure our life expectancy has increased since the day when our mothers greeted us after school like some kind of a freakish hybrid of June Cleaver and a stepford wife, but at what cost.

Didn't we always learn when we were growing up that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Next time we look at our own kids let's try to figure out exactly what we're seeing. At the end of the movie when our Little Miss Sunshine performed her dance to the dulcet tones of Rick James' Superfreak I smiled. I smiled at the thought of a smack-snorting grandfather teaching his granddaughter to thumb her nose at societal norms, I smiled at our society for accepting those norms, but mostly I smiled because at that moment I thought about just how glad I was that my own kids are still too young to know boundaries.

Hopefully by the time they are old enough, their mother and I will have given them enough fuel to ride right over any norms that try to hold them back, hit reverse and ride over them again. Yes I want fries with that Happy Meal . . . and don't be holding back on the f---in' special sauce either.