I live in the same Florida town as Terri Schiavo, the young woman whose feeding tube has been removed and reinserted in the past few weeks while her husband, parents, and lawmakers battle over who has the right to decide whether she should live or die.
I learned the most surprising fact about the case in Sunday's paper -- Terri Schiavo is on life support because her bulimia caused an abnormal heart rhythm, which led to a heart attack that deprived her brain of oxygen long enough to leave her in a vegetative state.
In "The Lost Lesson of Terri Schiavo," lawyer Gary Fox writes about the culture of "lookism" that led to Schiavo's bulimia and to Fox's victory in a civil suit against doctors who didn't recognize her illness.
Also in Sunday's paper was a story on how boys deal with weight issues. Three teens were quoted, one who feels he's too skinny, one who weighs 260 pounds and has never tried to lose weight, and one who says a cause of weight problems is depression. Something he prevents by eating chocolate.
And if that's not enough to indict us as a society that is distracted from some core concerns, there is this local rhetorical question to ponder: "Do treats sour the learning process?" Maybe the question should be whether they sour kids' self-esteem.
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