It seems we have reached that rung in the ladder of our social and biological evolution where everyone either has, or wants something to be wrong with them.
Now, I understand if someone was born with epilepsy, not wanting to battle the pelvis grinding wooden dance floors of their local club while the mind numbing strobe lights are chopping colourful lines throughout the room. In that same breath you could sympathize with a bee sting allergy sufferer not being overly keen on waltzing past a colony that has taken up temporary residence in the acacia tree in their back garden.
H
owever, I cannot fathom how people can convince themselves of the just nature of refusing to work and rather pillaging the public grant coffers because of their supposed incapacity to earn a decent wage. Over 8 million pounds of the queens good money was spent on gout sufferers during 2011.
| | | I don't know about anyone else, but I have gone to work with far worse than gout as a bi-product of an over eager drinking hand flexing one or two times more than needed the night before. |
The origins of the word gout come from the Latin
gutta which quite simply translated means "a drop". Which seems very suitable as the main causes of this grant-budget allocating condition is an over consumption of beer, wine and meat. This means that as a tax payer I am forking out a portion of my cookies each year for someone to miss his or her own work on the basis they blew the broth of a few barley soda's, gave a tongue lashing to a rib-eye and had a little tingly feeling in their big toe the next day.
In that same line of thought let's touch on the topic we all think about but can't talk about with any particular gusto, the real elephant in the room, obesity. The US public health care system spends over $500 000 000 on the treatment of obesity each year. Now contrary to what you might think, over eating is not the prime cause of obesity in America, it is actually the choice of foods and the content of these products that has caused what so embarrassingly needs to be described as "an epidemic". The drive to make food cheaper, tastier, faster to prepare and more gluttonous is what researchers are saying is the cause of the average belt running out of holes to clip around waists across America. So this means that when carting their trolleys down the aisle's of their local
Bottom Dollar Food store more and more Americans are vying for space in the calorie clustered frozen pizza and pop tart section of the shops and not bothering to trudge their way towards the lesser calorie collective corners of the capacious cabbage and carrot sections of their local
Caraluzzi's. $110 billion is spent on fast food each year in America which is larger than the entire annual budget spent to run the Republic of South Africa for a year, or the money could fund 73 Space Shuttle flights. That same incredible amount of green could also buy antiretroviral drugs for the entire world for 3 years! But instead we have to fork out a further $500 million to make sure these super sized spenders of fast food don't eat themselves into a Mac-stroke. Not only that, we go one step further in condoning this food fatale by compensating their gargantuan gluttony with an incapacity grant. The cherry on the top of this enormous cake, is the acts of deceit these super-sized citizens practice when delicately posting pictures of themselves from advantageous angles on their social media pages, meanwhile proving their own hypocrisy by claiming money on the one side of the stone and claiming sensual voluptuousness on the other.
Situational and coincidental imperfection is probably the trendiest version of drying public fund grapes into raisins. A bumper-bash on a suburban road or even peak hour traffic where the possibility of any furious speed is highly improbable and one driver is sharp enough to take the initiative. Either one of two things happens from here, the devious driver falls out of his car in a sprawl of pain as if he had been shot in the back and promptly executes his most convincing Ronaldo impersonation. Or both drivers calmly trade details, get back in their very lightly damaged vehicles and later it dawns on him that he could probably squeeze a little more juice out of this bruised orange. A quick medical check up where he explains the excruciating pain emanating from his neck and back while talking in a tone normally reserved for throat cancer sufferers as if he had been gargling with thumb tacks for the previous week to accentuate the performance. He later leaves with a doctor's certificate confirming his "apparent" whiplash and promptly skips off home as if he is the owner of a Willy Wonka Golden Ticket. We all know the inevitable proceedings here after, which often leaves someone paying for the stupendous performance given by the supposed "victim".
It seems we are on a quest to find something inherently wrong with ourselves. Perhaps it is to justify a lack of forth coming success in our lives, or a dubious attempt at sympathy for which so many are partial to be on the receiving end of. In some cases it is a personal gain that motivates us to excel in being as far below average as we possibly can be. The argument could be made that the only way to justify this current trend is to pin the blame on justification itself. Have we on a social and economic level become a race of people that want to analyze ourselves and hope for something to be wrong? We can now justify going down the ladder rather than up it because we have placed prizes on both ends. Since the prize at the bottom is easier to reach, striving for imperfection seems a much easier task to accomplish. Then once the dust has settled and you find yourself on the ground once more with your hand clinching onto the lesser of two prizes, you can finally be safe in the knowledge that there is something wrong with you.
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