WHAT’S THE PROBLEM?

By Steve Fey

What truly drives me nuts is that I really don’t understand things. At all. I mean, I have no idea why people do what they do. For instance, why do people drive SUVs? The seem to me to combine all of the drawbacks of a truck with none of the advantages. So what are they good for? I don’t know.

Another thing, why can’t people just tell the simple truth? Think about it: we’re all human. We all have weaknesses, and they’re all the same weaknesses. You know, for example, that any straight man that sees a sexy woman doing a striptease is going to react. Positively. That’s the way we’re wired, and if I were going to get preachy I’d say that somebody must have meant us to react positively to that sort of thing. There’s some purpose, right? So, what’s the problem? Do you think you’re liable to cheat on your wife because some stripper gets you hot? Are you? Would you? Do you think you’ll ever have sex with that stripper? Sure, buddy, right after my hot date with her. Oh, yes, I’ll do that, and then I’ll sprout wings and fly to Saturn for the weekend. It’s not the feeling you get watching her strip, it’s what you do about it, you moron! Don’t lie and say you find her behavior reprehensible. Lighten up! It can be fun, even.

And this biggie for me: why do people expect to go through life and not be offended? You know what offends me? People who are offended by the world! Look right at it, kiddos, the world is chock full of offensive things. There are starving children, wars, pestilence, torture, Republican conventions, all sorts of horrible things. And somehow you manage to think you have a right not to be offended? My friend, I think you must be vacationing on Saturn.

So our society does have some problems. There are those people who would like us to be just like them, ignorant as they are of the fact that they should be just like us. Of course, one big difference is that we aren’t saying that we want to kill them because they’re not like us. We want to kill them because they’re trying to kill us. That’s a real problem. Gas costs quite a bit these days (I paid $2.49 today in Victorville, California) and that’s problematic. People are kidnapped and murdered every day, children are exploited for the amusement of creepy guys, yes, we’ve got trouble, right here in River City, and all over, and no doubt about it. But the biggest problem facing our society I haven’t named yet. That’s the terrible problem we have with being all fat as pigs. Weight loss in America today is a multi-billion dollar enterprise, because that’s the biggest single problem facing our society in the early twenty-first century.

We’re too fat! That’s our problem? Holy buckets, people, do you know how many times in the history of life on Earth a species has had a society burdened by too much food? I do. I checked. Wanna know? Once. That’s right, only once, and this is it. For the love of Twinkies, bagels and popcorn, how about we wise up enough to appreciate how great we’ve got it? Those children continue to starve around the world, the other abuses continue, most a lot worse than anything happening here, and we carp about the exact content of our diet sodas. Gad-Zookers y’all! Why are you picky about the little things that influence the fringes of your health? You complain all the time, but apparently you want to spend as long as you possibly can in a world you apparently don’t like all that much. So, as I’ve said before, ladies and gentlemen:

Why?