My Big Brother is Stealing My Toys!

How do you get away with legalizing the sentence, “If you aren’t elected to a public office, you’re stupid.”? You do it by telling people you’re only trying to help. Do-gooders should really stick to helping little old ladies across the sidewalk.

Their latest outrage happened in San Francisco. The city has banned food establishments from including a toy with any children’s meal that has a designated amount of calories, fat and sugar. Happy meals are no longer happy. Now you have to buy SSDD meals.

The city did this under the pretext that America is fighting a battle with childhood obesity and it just wasn’t going to happen in their back yard. Right. They did it because while they were sitting around polishing their halos one day, they found yet another way to tell people they’re too stupid to make up their own minds. Supervisor Bevan Dufty (yes, apparently that is actually someone’s real name) voiced the opinion that they were going to do this even though a lot of folks would say it was just good old San Francisco being its good old crazy self. He’s wrong. He’s not acting crazy. He’s acting mean. With a godson like him, it’s no wonder Billie Holiday sang the blues.

Here’s what happens when people pass laws of this nature. Parents are absolved of any responsibility for raising their own children. Children, in turn, learn nothing about taking responsibility for their own actions. Is this what we want our children to learn? Is this what we want for ourselves?

Admittedly, if you fed your child on nothing but happy meals, the child would not be the healthiest kid on the block. If, however, you gave your child an occasional happy meal, you’ve done the equivalent of giving the child a couple cookies on a day where they had a healthy breakfast and supper. Are happy meals in and of themselves evil because they aren’t made entirely of fruits and vegetables and therefore harmful to children? Try feeding a diabetic child a couple of nectarines and see what happens. Does including a toy in a happy meal turn it into a diabolical ploy to make our children butterballs? It does not. Do parents have the option when they do buy a happy meal of choosing apple slices and juice to go with it? Yes, they do.

I am enormously fond of happy meals. I don’t eat much, and they’re just the right size to fill me up. It’s also nice that they have cool little toys that I can scatter across my desk and play with when I’m a little short on writing inspiration. Would I buy them every day? No, I would not. Will I buy them every once in awhile? Yes, I will.

If you live on a steady diet of donuts, you’re not going to be healthy. If you feed your child nothing but cake and strudel, your child is probably going to be round and the kid’s teeth will fall out. When I have occasional treats, I know I’m going to be fine. When I overindulge, I don’t whine about it the next day because I’m responsible for my own actions. If I fed my child on nothing but sweets and fat, I sure as hell wouldn’t go crying to Oprah that the world had conspired to turn my kid into a planetoid. When I was raising my son, I tried to be responsible about what I fed him, and he got sweets to balance out the broccoli. He was not a round child, and when he left for college he didn’t go on a mad Milky Way binge. The bottom line here is that sometimes everyone needs a cookie, and I don’t need the government to decide how I get to eat it.

Lily Robertson, who thinks elected officials have better things to do than take toys away from children, can be reached at canopicjargon@gmail.com, on Facebook, or you can leave a message here in the comments section.