Maybe they ought to charge an extra tax for clean water.

Here's a blog I wrote yesterday while I was at work:

I just finished reading this article about a proposed “fat tax”. (http://www.slate.com/id/2228713) Okay, I won’t lie. I didn’t read ALL of the article, but I did read most of it. Here’s what I think: I see the point about the tax. It could have its benefits as far as reducing the amount of soda drank by consumers in this country. But the last paragraph of the article really outlines the whole problem for me: the people that this tax will most affect are the ones who can’t afford healthy beverages and juices to replace soda in their diets, and while, yes, water is an extremely cheap option for most of us, I do not advise drinking water from the tap. Ever. Now, I do have a Brita water filter myself, one of those pitchers. I use tap water to fill it. But having lived in Campbellsville for the majority of my life with a subpar city water filtration system, I can say that the suggestion at the end of this article is more preposterous than the idea of calling a tax “fat tax”. (Click the “drink from the faucet” link there in the last paragraph. It’ll take you to a lengthy but informative NY Times article about disregard for the Clean Water Act.)

Campbellsville, per capita, probably has one of the highest cancer rates in the state, if not the nation. Breast cancer is incredibly common, and many young women my age and younger (self included) have had cysts on/in various parts of their reproductive systems. Many have had cysts so large on their ovaries that they could actually be considered tumors, and several of these women have had to have such growths removed more than once. Everyone knows that the problem is the city water, yet no one does anything about it. Growing up, we always drank bottled water. Even when we saw no negative effects from drinking the tap water, it still tasted disgusting. But there’s no way to stop using contaminated water completely. It would be far too expensive, not to mention inconvenient, to use bottled water for bathing as well. Then again, why should we have to? It’s just unbelievable how little gets done to protect basic human rights like the availability of clean water. (Let’s not get started on clean water in other countries. That’s a fight that we may never win.) I mean, did we learn nothing from the likes of Erin Brokovich and Karen Silkwood?

The other issue I had with the article was the fact that it was called a “fat tax”. How insulting is that to overweight people? At least the government isn’t suggesting we tax people for each pound they are overweight. So much for my fondness of WWII era America.