When the Surgeon General tells us what we're doing wrong, it's a lot easier to take than when friends, relations and passersby feel called upon to do so. Miss Manners does not attribute the difference to a public official's exerting more authority, but to his exercising more tact and refraining from doing it to our faces.
Still, Miss Manners worries about the speed with which one method leads to the other.
Obesity is a serious health problem, the Surgeon General has now informed us, as indeed it was his duty to do. It must be right up there with the serious health problem of voluntary malnourishment, which is attributed to our admiration for thinness. It would appear that everybody in America is too fat, except for those who are too thin; everybody is eating too much, except for those who are eating too little, and nobody is exercising enough, except for those who are exercising too much.
Something must be done. Fortunately, not by Miss Manners.
She is far too polite to notice what other people are or are not eating. She doesn't bother to lift her lorgnette to peer at who is using which fork, disillusioning as that must be to people who believe that scouting for cutlery errors provides her with unimaginable thrills. So she would hardly notice how often they use whichever fork they choose.
The only thing that concerns her about such a public health announcement is the unintended effect it may have on the public well-being. Health matters seem to be peculiarly susceptible to developing the unintended side effect of contributing to an epidemic that is already a great danger to the public, namely rudeness.
What makes her especially wary in this case is that that reference was made to another health announcement by another Surgeon General. It is being said that illnesses caused or exacerbated by obesity may soon constitute the chief cause of preventable deaths, overtaking the current scourge, which is tobacco.
Here again, Miss Manners must excuse herself (but not to indulge in that vice, which happens to be one of which she is innocent). In no way does she fail to appreciate the great service done to the public by alerting it to the danger of smoking, and the amazing turnabout in behavior that was the result.
This also produced an advance in etiquette, for which she is thankful. Smoke being intrusive, the custom of smoking without regard to those present who might find smoke objectionable was inherently rude, and the fact that this is now recognized is progress. It was progress backward, to a few decades previously, when smoking had been quarantined to back rooms so as not to offend presumably nonsmoking ladies, but progress all the same.
Then came the plague, not just of smoking scofflaws, but of righteous busybodies. Newly empowered with public support, nonsmokers started polluting the atmosphere with unsolicited and insulting healthcare. Nor have they been intimidated from doing this in regard to the eating habits of those whom they deem to be overweight by not knowing whether there are other contributing factors.
And they certainly haven't been inhibited by politeness. Miss Manners hopes they will not consider the obesity warning encouragement to point out to the obese that they are obese and that this is not good for them. On the contrary, it should relieve them of the job. There can be no doubt that they already know (as if they didn't before), because the Surgeon General has now told them.
DEAR MISS MANNERS: When my niece was married in a morning ceremony at a small suburban church, her father (who divorced my sister a few years ago after 37 years of marriage) attended with his bride, an educated professional Japanese woman who was clad in a beautiful kimono. I thought it was an inappropriate choice of dress. Several of my family members disagreed.
GENTLE READER: The formal dress of one's own country is considered appropriate at formal gatherings in America. Miss Manners suspects that she may need to point out that this applies to the trophy wives of cads as much as to anyone else.
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