Sunday 17 April 2011

Duty

One response to society turning on fatz I’m not feeling is "We don't owe society health" etc.,

Apart from rejecting the idea society or its authority always knows how to 'acquire' health. We have a sense of duty about our own well being anyway. I see no evidence to the contrary unless you count not necessarily wishing or being able to do exactly what certain self declared experts want us to do any time they want us to do it.

Society though can speak to my sense of duty anytime and I will certainly consider it. Not out of toadying acquiescence, but because of all the mostly unknown people who strove, fought, suffered and refused to give in to whatever low standard was the form of their time.

In spite of the price they had to pay.

Whether they were privileged or skating the edge of destitution, whether they made their aim a small point of eccentricity, specificity or an all encompassing vision of better lives, they contributed.

Because of them many of us are alive that wouldn't be or still in the game in a better condition than we would be, they've increased our well being as well as our health. If that sounds overly dramatic, take a look at the infant mortality rates of developing countries and their overall life expectancy rates.

Take a look at the lives lead and see the absence of people who care enough to fight.

I move, freer, easier, better not just because they existed, but because they refused to let things lie as they were.

That is why any society I live in can ask me to do everything from pay tax, to re-cycle my rubbish, because if I can't do something to make the world a better place in any small way, I endeavour not to leave it worse off so that those who come or will exist after me will not have to reap that.

Thing is, if family, friends, community, authority, society invoke our sense of duty to take extra care with our weight because it is deemed a potential or actual problem. We listen, because we believe in them. That belief has to be be mutual, or not at all.

If it is not, that is where any duty they can invoke, ends.

Once that fault has opened, the duty relied upon is suspended along with the trust and that's fair enough because those who needed to forgo trust in us to formulate their premise and didn't and that was reason to rethink, should expect no better from others.

Until a way is found to re-gain trust withdrawn, any target of this has the right to withdraw its trust from society in return and tell it what to do with its proposition.

If I have a duty to consider advice as far as it is honestly known, it has to be honest and there is a duty not to impinge or depress my health in the process. That should go without saying, but as it clearly hasn't.

Society has a duty not to stigmatize us, for any reason or to any end if it seeks to, it forfeits any right to lecture about the health it seeks to mishandle. If it claims we are doing the wrong things because they're expedient for us, it has no right to do the wrong things for its own expediency, either.

Simple.

We fat people have already acted in good faith according to society’s dictates. We expect that good faith to be returned by observation of the facts. If that is not desirable, it should not desire to interfere, harass in anyway, until it is.

If success depended on acting on the advice of authority, the weight of society would have gone into reverse without any shadow of a doubt. It did not, because that depended on what authority could not deliver, efficacy.

Society has the duty not to mea culpa and not pretend we are to blame for that.

It is truly a tribute to the good will of fatz that it has taken many of us this long to begin to catch on to this, hence the dawning anguished fury of to hell with duty and so on.

I can understand that.

But this low class crusade and the base motives of people acting in accord with it, no matter how decent, will never write my heart.

That's already been done by better and that is that.

The only thing it can do is change my view of society and the people in it, most especially authority.

Things can never been the same as they were before due to the way our sense of duty has been cynically mis-used.

We are entitled to be more circumspect, the suspicion that was absent from the start of the project now, isn't.

2 comments:

  1. When someone tells me I have a "duty" to be "healthy", I tell them the only "duty" I have is to be as "healthy" as I can be, in the body I have now, and that my definition of "healthy" trumps theirs, as I'm the one living in this body and I know it much better than they ever will.
    Usually, our definitions of "healthy" are miles apart, but that's not my problem, it's their problem, and they have to deal with it because I'm not going to argue with them over something that is none of their business (they don't pay my bills, they don't pay for my insurance, etc).

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  2. the only "duty" I have is to be as "healthy" as I can be, in the body I have now, and that my definition of "healthy" trumps theirs, as I'm the one living in this body and I know it much better than they ever will.

    Exactly! And that's what crusaders should trust in. Certainly they have no legitimate grounds not to.

    They want to cast us as untrustworthy solely because the opposite would destroy the basis of their crusading.

    In other words their "mistrust" is convenient necessity.

    And we should not be expected to pretend otherwise.

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