OVER ME AND US: HEY BIG SUGAR
Governor Paul LePage is right on, sort of, kind of:
It is high time for Maine people, American people everywhere to stand up to Big Sugar, but not as a thinly veiled attack on people who need food-stamps.
Big Sugar has been poisoning our children for far too long and that has got to stop. As the USDA and other opponents of Governor LePage's anti-Big Sugar initiative know, it can be hard to quantify the public health impact of sugary beverages and junk food items on everyday citizens. For example, Big Sugar operates alongside Big Tobacco and Big Pharma and Big DOW/JONES and Big FacebookAmazonGoogle to create one heck of a physio-psycho-chemico-digito-alphabet-soup we all swim around in daily. Big Sugar nasty, Big Sugar ugly, Big Sugar killing ME and US.
It isn't just the present-day intake: Big Sugar is for many Americans a daily reminder of our nation's brutal legacies of chattle slavery, Middle Passage, and the Triangle Trade, just like a favorite old supersoftened t-shirt may recall King Cotton and his many haunted house factories, the plantations of the North American South, or the textile mills of the North American North.
But I think Governor LePage should stop begging current President Donald Trump for favors on the matter of further regulating food stamp purchases until he can first get Big Sugar out of the State House in Augusta. Let me explain:
Earlier this month I visited the famous Bulfinch State House by the Kennebec and was surprised to find Big Sugar alive and well in our solemn palace of law. There reared Big Sugar, first before the morning legislative session in the form of myriad pastry––muffins, scones, danish, Big Sugar dusted donuts––spread out on a table like other lobbyists had pamphlets and give-away buttons. Then later, at a lunch-hour presentation on Early Childhood Education for the multipartisan Children's Caucus, Big Sugar again lolled its serpentine head.
There at the Children's Caucus luncheon, legislators who just last year debated measures to tax sugary beverages and junk food enjoyed sandwiches, small packages of potato chips, over-sweet cookies, and a variety of bottled Coca-Cola products averaging somewhere on the order of a billion empty-sugar calories per dose. To say nothing of the single-use plastic!
I confess, I don't know how those food items of dubious nutrition made their way into the State House, but I suspect a committee or two approved a vendor contract or two, and tax-payer monies were spent. Are being spent today. If that is in fact the case, I want a refund. If budget cuts are to be made, let's start there, however small the line-item.
By any means necessary, let's stand up to Big Sugar as a vote for the future of ME and US. Just as King Cotton was brought down, so too will Big Sugar be winnowed. But doing that will mean everyone doing their fair share, not just people who use food-stamps to get by.
Hypocrisy in Augusta or Washington or any capitol building anywhere is a matter of right and wrong. It is dead right to fight Big Sugar, and it is dead wrong for anyone, elected official or otherwise, to wield the chastening rod with one hand while biting a mega-muffin-top held in the other.
Dirigimos Always,
Rufus Morgan Kreilkamp Nicoll
District 134, Maine