Of cubes, dirty hair and politics

I used to think that I had a fairly active job (no laughing Josh!) until I moved over to being an inspector. It's still darn busy but no matter how active I am during the day there is no getting around the fact that I have been assigned a cube. Those tiny iconic markers of modern workdom. The mauve box with a bank of glaring white fluorescents overhead and a high back rolly chair. But worse of all is the computer screen set in the middle. Hours upon hours, worker bees all over the planet are wired into the network sitting somewhere in the honeycomb to input their data; a medical transcript over here, accounts receivable data over there, and yes -- fire hazards found yesterday, right here in my new cube.

But I'm pretty lucky, my data entry takes only a few hours each day and the rest of the time I'm outside. Not so for many of us-- and therein lies a problem.

You see we just weren't made for all this sitting around. We're supposed to be moving, working hard at just one all important goal- staying alive. It's only very recently that we have had the luxury of getting our meat wrapped in plastic and kept frozen just steps from the place where we will sit down and eat it. It wasn't long ago that eating plants meant walking to where they grew, when they grew, collecting them and bringing some back home for those less mobile. We had to work for everything we ate and many times, no doubt, went hungry when the supply ran low.

More recently, even as late as our grandfather's or maybe our great grandfather's time, schedules revolved around the fluctuations of sustenance. We can still see signs of this if we look closely. Calendars still show the phases of the moon, when a family can plan on staying out late to work in the fields by it's light. Summer vacation just ended for my boys, a relic of an idea where the kids would be home from school all day during the peak growing season to work the fields. A tradition held over from a time when such things were that important, but now it's origins are nearly forgotten. It wasn't that long ago we had to work our asses off just to eat.

Years ago there was TV reality show called "Frontier House" (if you have Netflix it is worth getting) where four ordinary families were followed in rural conditions that existed just over a century ago. Each was told that they would have to work hard all day every day to bring in water, cut firewood, hunt for meat and grow their own crops. In the beginning two prissy teen aged girls were grossed out after the second day because they were unable to wash their hair. But in just a few weeks the same girls were filthy, with flies on their faces and seemingly unaware of it. When you're hungry and need to work to stay alive your priorities change pretty fast. Later one of the men on the show was taken to a doctor because he had lost so much weight and it was feared he was ill. After a check up it was determined he was fine. His rapid weight loss was just a result of his calorie intake being so much less and the long physical labor he was putting in. That's the way it was back then. Not many fat people.

We don't have to work that hard anymore, at least most of us don't. We sit in our cubes and stare into the glowing box. But the impulses to scavenge and stuff something into our face whenever we see it continues in as strong as ever. Which is the simple reason 2 out of 3 Americans are overweight or obese. No real workie but lots of greazie, sugary food. If I don't run, I slide right into that overweight category. And being overweight creates a slew of health problems, from heart attacks to the current spike we see in diabetes.

Overeating and not exercising are a biproduct of our "success", but other things like smoking addiction, which I have written about before, contribute to it too.

Which brings me to this countries current health care debate. "Single payer", "co-ops", "public options" and the like are all the buzz words being bandied about. We get so fixated on who is going to pay for something that we lose sight of the real issue-making people healthier. That needs to be the starting point, not the peripheral result if all else in the new law goes right. The main focus needs to be a fresh look at keeping people healthy in the first place, not how to pay for more and bigger band-aids after they get sick. We need to stop talking about creating a huge bureaucracy that maybe, just maybe, will end up in people getting healthier. We need to come up with a plan that starts with prevention and then goes to treatment. Be proactive instead of reactive. Like my new job, if you prevent the fire in the first place then you never need to go put it out. Make prevention and incentives (such as an increase in insurance rate for smokers. High risk insured already pay more in areas like homeowners and automobile) a part of any new legislation.

And if you're going to choose to make bad decisions about yourself, such as being fat and smoking, that is your choice. But I don't want to pay for it. Before community there should always be the individual. And now if you'll excuse me, I've stared into this video monitor for way too long!