Words Don't Pull the Trigger; They Load the Gun

I've been trying to process the various responses to Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords' attack, and I feel very conflicted when listening to both sides.

On the left, people are saying that recent vicious political rhetoric is to blame for Jared Loughner's shooting rampage. Sarah Palin, in particular, has been on the defensive because of the map dotted with crosshairs she put out some time ago, urging Tea Partiers and Republicans to target 20 House Democrats who supported Obama's Health Care Plan. The argument seems to be that the right's use of violent words (such as "target") and images spurred Loughner to commit the crime, and if we are to avoid another tragedy like this one, we need to tone down the rhetoric.

The right is responding a number of ways. Some, such as Palin herself, are saying that Loughner was a madman and that Tea Partiers and Republicans should continue to speak out against policies they disagree with, using any metaphors they please. Others -- and I find this most interesting -- have decided to skirt the issue altogether and focus instead on making a devil of Loughner's attorney, Judy Clarke, the death penalty expert who represented Ted Kaczynski, Eric Rudolph, Zacarias Moussaoui, and Susan Smith.

To briefly address the approach of making Clarke somehow the real villain in this story: as my husband reminded me the other day, John Adams represented the British in the Boston Massacre and was humiliated for it, but he did it because the criminal justice system distinguishes the law-abiding society from the anarchic forces that seek to undermine it. The Right always trots out the founding fathers when it's convenient -- might as well be consistent with that strategy, eh?

As to the other (more viable) debate -- did madness pull the trigger, or did Sarah Palin? -- I don't believe the answer is clear one way or the other. I side with the right when I say that the spark of insanity had to be present in Loughner for him to believe that killing a 9-year-old girl (which he achieved) or a Congresswoman would change anything for the better. Without some chemical imbalance, or deranged upbringing, or both, he'd probably just be another "me," mumbling at the television or newspaper when I see the democratic system isn't working the way I'd hoped.

But I also have to admit, as a literature professor, that words do things. Speech act theory tells us that words such as "I now pronounce you man and wife," or "we. . .do. . .solemnly publish and declare, that these united colonies are, and of right ought to be free and independent states," change people's lives in tangible ways. Strong words can cause people to see the world differently, can call them to take action, either for the better or, in Loughner's case, for worse.

Perhaps words don't pull the trigger, but I believe they load the gun. In that sense, then, I also side with the left. We should be careful of the rhetoric we soak in and spit back out, and, most importantly, we should refuse to elect the people who seek to polarize us with hate speech. We should agree to continue to debate but should try to do so civilly and without embracing fallacies instead of facts. We can't prevent another shooting like the one in Arizona because we can never get rid of insanity, but we can decrease the likelihood by refusing to feed madness with vitriol.

Food (and other) Rules

So, I absolutely appreciate that, at the heaviest I've ever been, I'm going to write a blog about weight and health. But who doesn't appreciate a little irony in the new year?

At the beginning of 2010, a friend of mine wrote me an email and said that she was tired of being unhealthy and was gathering tips from people about making lifestyle changes. I typed up a response, thinking little of it until I noticed a few months later that my friend had lost several sizes. "What have you been doing?" I asked her. "I printed out your email," she said, "and your suggestions worked." We were sitting with a colleague, who asked for the "plan," and others started asking for it, too, so I thought -- why not use the blog to type it up? The 3 top goals for the new year are, after all, saving money/getting out of debt, quitting smoking, and losing weight. So in the spirit of things, a la Michael Pollan (from whom I borrowed a bit), here are my "Food (and other) Rules":

1. Shop on the periphery of the supermarket. Milk, meat, and vegetables are sold there; the stuff in the middle is processed, and full of unpronounceable ingredients with which your body can do very little. If you limit what you buy from those aisles, it's likely you'll greatly cut down on sugar and sodium without even trying or calorie counting.

2. As soon as you get home, wash and cut up your fruits and vegetables and put them in a see-through ziplock bag. My husband unloads the other groceries while I do this, so that I'm not stuck in the kitchen for an entire afternoon. People use being too tired to chop as an excuse to grab a burger on the way home, but if the veggies are already chopped, and it takes 3 minutes to steam them in some chicken broth, you've already spent less time making dinner than you have sitting in the drive-through.

3. Put good-for-you food at eye level. I noticed when I put the chopped-up veggies in the vegetable drawer, they were out-of-sight, out-of-mind. But when I put them on the middle row in the fridge, when I opened it to think about what to have for lunch, "cauliflower!" was suddenly an easy answer I didn't have to dig for. The same rules go for your pantry -- putting those little bags of almonds with sea salt or 100-calorie packs of dried cranberries where your chips used to be takes the thinking out of what to have for a snack.

4. Eat on salad plates and out of ramekins. Throw out your giant pasta bowls -- if you fill them, you're eating enough for 3 people. But if you fill up a salad plate, you trick yourself into thinking you've indulged. As for the ramekins -- they hold about 1 cup of food. The average serving size of cereal is 3/4 of a cup, and a recent Cooking Light article I read confirmed that something like 90% of all people overpour, sometimes eating 400 calories for breakfast without even meaning to do so. You can't overpour in a ramekin.

5. Eat pizza, once a week, but make it yourself. No, seriously -- dieting means deprivation, and deprivation causes you to overeat, go off track, and go back to old habits. So plan to eat something you really like once a week, but make it yourself so you can control the ingredients and quality of the food. Homemade pizza is about 1,000 times better than take-out anyway.

6. Exercise 5 times a week, but make bargains with yourself, and rest for 2 days. Now that I'm about 7 1/2 months pregnant, the "bargaining" part of this rule is really important for me. There are several days that I wake up at 5 and don't want to go to the gym (my own rule is to work out first thing in the day so that you can't put it off, or so that people can't step on your workout schedule with surprise meetings, but that doesn't work for everybody). So I compromise; I promise that I'll take a lap in the swimming pool when I get home from work, or that I'll go ahead and get up at 5 but I can work on the recumbent bike (which is easy) instead of doing interval training (which I hate). Or if it's a really pretty day, my bargain is that I abandon the gym (where I get a more strenuous workout) and powerwalk near the lakes by the house, only I double the time I do it.

7. Vary your workout. This is kind of related to #6. Do different things so you don't get bored, or injured. Seems like a no-brainer, really. Last year I bought rollerblades and found out, using a heartrate monitor, that 20 minutes burned 300 calories. It took about 45 min of jogging to get the same results. Yay!

8. Give up on diets. Diets don't work because, when you're done, you go back to eating the way you did before.

9. Plan 3 meals a week ahead of time. The other reason people eat out is that they're hungry and they don't know what they're going to make for dinner, but if you planned your meals ahead of time, then you eliminate that problem. And there are several cookbooks out there (Sandra Lee has one, as does Robin Miller) that show you how to make one main dish and create 3 meals out of it, for people who are stretched for time, hate cooking, or are on a budget.

After teaching my food class, I've developed several other food rules, but I do not know how they'll affect my waistline. I've given up substituting splenda (which is apparently toxic) for sugar and have abandoned eating things with the word "lite" on the front, opting instead to just use less of something made with recognizable ingredients. I've also tried to cut down on eating red meat to once or twice a week, which has been easy since the baby reacts negatively to it most of the time. I'll have to wait until the spring/early summer to see if that has affected me at all, but so far, these "food rules" must work, since I'm on schedule (God willing!) to gain little more than the minimum 35 lbs the doctors recommend, have struggled with only minimum aches and pains during the pregnancy, and have managed to avoid other unfortunate pregnancy pitfalls, such as gestational diabetes.

Now that I've written this, I'll probably swell like a sausage and gain 20 lbs in the home stretch, being forced onto bedrest. But at least my strawberries will be prepped and ready for when I recover. =) What are your food (or other) rules?