Terrorists have finally figured out where to get us. It’s not in the White House or the World Trade Center, but right in our belly.The bomb scare at McDonald’s Friday morning was not confirmed as a terrorist act, though it might as well have been. Who else would have the gall to falsely alarm such an American institution? Definitely none of our upstanding, patriotic citizens.Why would anyone want to hurt those cute little McNuggets or disrupt the perfected form of standardization known as the assembly line? I know why I would. Can you say ‘sloth’?This indolence, for me, is what the golden arches represent. I understand freedom of choice and restrictions on time, but so do the executives at McDonald’s. That is why they buy mega-farms and create their own breed of chicken. And you can be damn sure that those executives are counting on our mismanagement of time and resources so their 88 cent burgers look like a bargain. A burger for a buck may be cheap, but it never is a deal.I have seen it before at the McDonald’s on High Street. One girl I met was on a personal boycott of this particular McDonald’s. She was fed up because her food was never fast and the employees were never personable, legitimate reasons for a boycott of a fast food super store it seemed to me. She told me this story as we crossed High Street at Woodruff on her way to McDonald’s. She then told me today she was ending her week long boycott because strawberry shakes were back, or something like that. Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not an extremist vegetarian fighting for animal rights, or vegetable rights for that matter. A wise man once said, or maybe it was a bumper sticker, that if God did not want us to eat animals he wouldn’t have made them out of meat. Even “Health and Fitness” magazine does not know what to tell you about the fast food:”Fast food are a part of the American lifestyle. We used to say ‘as American as apple pie.’ Today we hear, ‘as American as a Big Mac and a Coke!'”Then in the same article the magazine goes on to describe ways to combat the lack of fast food nutritional options:”The key is to limit your intake of fast foods-and choose wisely.
- Order 1 percent milk instead of soda.
- Avoid fried foods.
- Cut down on fat in fried foods by removing the outer coating before eating.
- Carry a piece of fresh fruit to include with your meal.”
Well thanks for caring “Health and Fitness,” and I am sorry for the writer that wasted his/her time. Carry a piece of fresh fruit? Why don’t they just tell us to eat fruit instead? Because that would be crazy, and that might upset the Micky D execs who said that anything less than zero free thought is bad. Ray Kroc, co-founder of McDonald’s, was quoted in the Sept. 3 Rolling Stone saying “We cannot trust some people who are nonconformists. We will make conformists out of them in a hurry…The organization cannot trust the individual; the individual must trust the organization.” Is this who we want dictating our diets? One friend of mine went to Russia about ten years ago during the good ole days of communism. He told me that people lined up out the doors to buy quarter pounders (although that`s not what they call them there). It was not necessarily about the burgers, as much as it was about the wrapper. You see, toilet paper was expensive…I don’t know if this is lore or lies, but you have to admire the ingenuity. Ingenuity is what McDonald’s fears, because ingenuity is what it would take to stay away from them.
Michael C. Bender sometimes wishes he was a Russian terrorist.
