Tuesday, July 12, 2011

Does U2 think your weight is shameful?


No snark here, I just don't know the answer.

My friend and colleague Dr. Glenn Posner snapped the photo up above when he was at the recent U2 concert in Montreal.

According to him, the scoreboard had all sorts of statistics including:

How many births this year?
Deaths?
Deaths from smoking?
Population of the stadium?
World population?
Current time in different cities?
How many years the leader of Thailand spent under house arrest?
Amount of money government spends on education?


Another friend who went told me there were more, including number of people starving, homeless, unemployed, etc.

Sounds like the theme to a degree are things of which society might want to be ashamed.

So what's your take on their inclusion of,

"Overweight people in the world"?
Undoubtedly I see the world through weight-sensitive glasses, and consequently my read on this is that U2 considers it to be a shameful statistic, reflective of gluttony. If they wanted it to reflect a failing of our environment leading to global weight gain they'd have included statistics like,

Number of commercials for fast food a kid sees before they're 4.
Crop subsidies given to corn and HFCS vs. fruits and vegetables.
Percentage of parents who think juice is a fruit.
Percentage of kids who go to school without breakfast.
Percentage of schools with deep fryers.
Percentage of schools selling chocolate milk and sport drinks.
Average number of fast food restaurants within walking distance of a school.
Dollars spent on meals not cooked at home.
Percentage of families that still have family dinners every night.


Of course, maybe I'm just being overly sensitive. Am I reading too much into this?