Let's Drain the Swamp

Remember when I told you about Matt Myklusch's debut book, Jack Blank and the Imagine Nation? Well, the main character lives in an orphanage built on a swamp. Every year, the building sinks a bit, and the people who run the orphanage address the problem by continually adding new top floors.

Fantastic world-building.

Sucky orphanage-building.

It's also a faulty approach healthcare reform. A lot of people are getting their knickers in a twist about facts and nonfacts regarding proposed reform legislation, with the two main factions becoming increasingly strident. But for all the hullabaloo, both sides are really just arguing about how to build that new top floor on the sinking orphanage.

Nobody wants to deal with the root cause: the swampy foundation.

To my mind, that unstable muck is our national fitness level. How many maladies clogging doctor's offices can be prevented? A heck of a lot.

Let's consider it. The vast majority of us who are overweight don't have to be. We don't have to be addicted or habituated to nicotine, alcohol, and other nonessential substances. We don't have to let the sun damage our skin. We don't have to limit our diet to processed foods. We don't have to eat more calories than we need in a given day. We do these things to ourselves.

Our foundation is swampy, folks. We're up to our rocks in poor decisions. But the great thing about decision opportunities is that they inherently offer choices.

We have choices.

So let's drain the swamp.

Instead of the current name-calling over minute (and sometimes nonexistent) legislative proposal details, you know what I'd like to see?

A comprehensive, years-long national campaign for increasing fitness, health, and wellbeing.

A plan that's attractive enough to get us involved, and effective enough to keep us involved. A way for more of us to discover how much better life is when our bodies can do what they're set up to do: walk, run, jump, climb, crawl, twist, bend, and lift.

A campaign like this won't solve everything. People still have accidents and develop cancer and get old. But getting more fit as a nation will make a lot of current health cost issues moot.

Doing so is one of our choices.

Let's put down those top floor plans and start laying pipe.

[image via Geekologie]
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