Hope Darby Writings

I am currently writing an article regarding whether or not the diet industry should be held financially liable for people with eating disorders. As I write, I realize that this is just one more thing in a long line of “don’t blame me!” characteristics that define current society.

Don’t get me wrong. I understand eating disorders. Quite well, as a matter of fact, considering that I’ve battled them myself, to the point of being 5’5 and balanced precariously at 78-80lbs by age 15. I know the mentality, I know the desperation, I know the drive and need for the body type. But…no matter who or what influenced me, the decision was still mine. Common sense told me that not eating equals starvation which can equal death. I chose to start down the path that led me somewhere destructive.

Granted, once I had ventured so far into the disorder, I couldn’t find my way out alone. It took over my mind, and it was no longer a “choice.” It got out of control, out of hand, and drove me out of my mind. That was a consequence of my own actions.

Sure, I blame my then-boyfriend for convincing a then-14-year old girl that she was too “soft.” I suppose that’s a perk of being a controlling 18-year old guy; he got to influence me far more than he could have influenced someone older, someone who didn’t ache to please her first boyfriend. But can I blame him for my own actions? Not really. I can point the finger at him and proclaim him a catalyst, the instigator, but that’s all.

So why do people insist on trying to blame people they’ve never even met for their problems? A fellow eats McDonald’s every day for fifteen years, and now sues the company for making him morbidly obese. Someone smokes two packs of cigarettes every day for ten years, and now sues the company for giving him lung cancer. Kids play a shoot-em-up video game, and later take a gun to school and kill the bullies who have been torturing them for three years, so the parents sue the video game company for making their child go bad. What’s next? A barfly drinking a full bottle of tequila, then driving into town and getting into a near-fatal car crash, so they sue Jose Cuervo for forcing them to get drunk and drive?

Personal accountability is a dying art form, yet it permeates every single thing we do. Where does the line get drawn? If fitness and glamour magazines celebrated obese people, the world would cry with outrage, saying that the industry was trying to make their kids want to be fat. They show thin people, they’re accused of promoting eating disorders.

Here’s the thing:

It takes a certain type of mind to take the wrong path. If a balanced individual sees a physically fit and/or thin model in a magazine, she figures out how to achieve it for herself through healthy diet and exercise. If a balanced individual plays violent video games, they understand that the violence is pretend and is not to be reenacted in real life. If a balanced individual eats thirty Big Macs a month, they realize that they’re going to get fat. It is only when an unbalanced individual is introduced into these situations that things go wrong.

So maybe, just maybe, we ought to be seeking to help those unbalanced people understand how to make better choices and plans of action, rather than completely removing the “catalyst.” No one can grow if the “bad” things are simply removed. A child will never learn what “Hot!” means if they never experience any type of warmth. And an unbalanced person will never realize that they are unbalanced, if we pad their lives, wrap them in cotton wool, and never teach them anything different.