When I was in public school in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s the major social concern that was being taught was “Smoking Kills.” Some of my teachers were drug users so this was before “Just Say No to Drugs.” AIDS was just a plural form of a verb so by all means, children, experiment sexually. But they had these lessons on the horrors of smoking where my teacher would smoke a cigarette then exhale through a white handkerchief and pass around the yellow-brown gooey tar that would be lining our lungs if we smoked a cigarette. They had just started putting the Surgeon General’s warnings on the sides of cigarette packages. They showed films of people with mouth, throat or lung cancer speaking through a tracheostomy speaking valve. We drew class posters with slogans like “Kissing a smoker is like licking an ashtray.” It became a reflexive action to be repelled by anyone who smoked. It was this generation of indoctrinated children in California that voted to ban smoking in all public places.
Not only did they warn us students to never, ever smoke, they sent us home with tricks for getting our parents to stop smoking. I was advised to go home and hide my mother’s cigarettes. I did so. I suffered. I was advised to save my mother’s life by cutting her cigarettes in half. I did so. I suffered. My mother gave up cigarette smoking some years later and she made little “no smoking” signs to post in the bathrooms and on the dining table so visitors could suffer. My point is that I learned what every person interested in world domination knows: influence the young if you wish to enact social change.
So imagine my gut reaction to the magazine headline “Sitting is the New Smoking.” Cigarettes kill people. Now I risk life and limb by sitting down? According to the article in the AARP magazine “Sitting: Hazardous to Your Health” by Elizabeth Pope “Sitting for long periods increases the risk of obesity, diabetes, cancer, and early death.” I immediately envisioned children going home and hiding their parents’ chairs. I could imagine children drawing class art for the mural, “Have a seat – if you want to die!” Some youth slides into the seat on the bus ahead of the old lady and tells her, “Grandma, I’m just doing this for your own good.”
The high school kids who wait for the bus on the corner by my house smoke like chimneys but the stigma they can’t live down is if they are overweight. The president’s wife has as her social cause the fight against childhood obesity. My “the medium is the message” sensibilities notice the children’s art hung by the salad bar restaurant of evil sweets and cupcakes being run over and whipped by bicycles and jump ropes. I suspect they show grade schoolers the clip from WALL*E of all the humans who have sat so long in their hover chairs in space that they’ve lost all their bone mass and have become human elephant seals. A February 7 web-article from The Editors by Joe Kita says that businesses are posting signs by the elevators that say, “Burn calories not electricity – take the stairs” and just by posting the signs stair usage is up 35 percent. The advertisement that goes with that article is for woodway.com’s office treadmill. At the push of a button your desk’s surface raises and a treadmill slides out so you can walk while you handle business phone calls at work. The other image I gawked at was that of two women in business suit dress, right down to their high heeled pumps, having a meeting while sitting on Pilates exercise balls. Work those core muscles while you work!
Believe me, I’m watching my step these days -- counting them actually, since I got the high tech pedometer for Christmas. I take walks outdoors, I pace while I talk on the phone, I stand at the counter to do certain office tasks. But it still comes down to this: smoking is an unnatural activity for human beings with potentially lethal consequences. One chooses to smoke (at least at first). Sitting is something we're, well, designed to do. As Harold Hill recommends to Miss Marion in The Music Man, "Miss Marion I'd discuss anything in the world with you. But couldn't we do it sitting down? You do sit? Your knees bend?" So when did the blame for obesity fall upon the all-too-natural action of sitting? I know, I know, it's the sedentary lifestyle represented by sitting. Just don't be too shocked when in twenty years the current crop of government schooled children manage to ban sitting in all public places.
