The Fat Of The Land

Is your Little Leaguer so fat his blood type is Chee-tos? Do the other kids wait for your Cub Scout to jump in the pool so they can ride the wave? Is it difficult for your six-year-old to play Hide and Seek anymore?

I see you, Amber! At both ends of the Buick!

You're not alone. Americans have the fattest kids on earth. Over the last 20 years the number of overweight children in this country has doubled. Soon, if that trend continues, one of every three kids will be obese. I live near an elementary school and see it every day. Chubby little girls are now singing this rope-skipping rhyme:

Georgia, Texas
North Carolina!
I think I'm stiff-ring
Acute angina!

We used to play Kick the Can every summer night. Now kids play Sit on Your Can, or a game more like Mother May I Finish Off the Double-Stuff Oreos? "Generation Y," says U.S. surgeon general Richard H. Carmona, "is turning into Generation XL."

We only have each other to blame.

It's you, Mr. Dad, pumping your bike madly while you let your triple-chinned five-year-old lie in the back of his little vinyl bike caboose. He's back there on his cellphone, gorging on marsh-mallow bunnies. Let him pedal himself!

It's you, Mrs. Elementary School P.E. Instructor, letting policy wonks talk you into replacing sports that actually make a kid sweat—dodgeball, kickball, tag—with "activities" like competitive cup-stacking. Hey, nothing burns off fries like competitive cup-stacking. Can we let them do it in recliners?

It's you, Mr. School Board Member, cutting gym classes to supposedly focus on "literacy." Or reducing gym to one or two times a week. Do you realize about half the states require only a year of high school P.E. or less? Wonderful. Now we've got kids who not only can spell myocardial infarction but also will have one by their 30th birthday.

It's you, Mrs. U.S. Senator, spending hundreds of billions of dollars to check grandmothers for shoe bombs while letting funding for schools shrink to the size of Uday's heart. Meanwhile, our kids blow up like Macy's floats. It's all part of the No Child Left Behind Except the Ones We Couldn't Get with the Forklift Act.