Delaney Kerr's Blog

           Japan, Germany, Canada, and Switzerland; t hese nations are some of the fittest countries in regards to health and weight in the world. Although they may not be winning any violent wars, they are winning the battle against the obesity epidemic in a way that the United States has not yet developed. What's their secret? They all utilize and practice socialized or universal medicine.          Socialized medicine allows a nation's government to organize citizen's tax dollars in a way that allows for all citizens to be granted free or reduced-price access to medical care. Additionally, it allows the government to control and regulate the freedoms of advertisements, nutritional education, and healthcare. In doing this, the government focuses on the health of the nation, centering around the overall "public health" (Balko 2004, p. 396). Allowing the government the ability to evenly distribute wealth amongst all people is th...

        Dive deep into the jungle of media that bombards the average first-world person in the modern age, and one will find themselves lost in a labyrinth of movies and television series that they have never heard of, cutting the vines of dead social media platforms with a machete, filing through exclusively bad news and meaningless attempts at revolution, jumping over chasms that lead to a deep pit of miseducation, and running from the online arguments and altercations that so grip people who have found themselves too lost in the maze of popular culture. To give this web credit, there are positives to creating networks of loosely interconnected people, and there are educational television and media programs, but the dangers of getting lost in the darker sections of popular culture far outweigh the current benefits.           To begin, popular culture creates a normative atmosphere in which people much more liberally provide ...

        Underneath my basement radiator in my childhood home, in a mildly revolting amalgamation of dust bunnies, old buttons, small toys, and other tiny objects a child can easily lose if not already accidentally swallowed or broken, is a small white packet of practice reading books. I tenderly refer to this area as “the wreckage pile”, and there lies the corpse of my first ever endeavor into literacy: The Fat Cat Sat on the Mat , by Nurit Karlin.  This book was gifted to me at four years old or so by my mother, who ever encouraged me to read. Although I cannot quite remember the depths to which my first book delved into obese felines, I do remember the sentiment my mother gave me when we first read the book together: never stop reading. My mother explained to me throughout my childhood the importance of education, especially as a woman. My mother worked multiple jobs, took care of two children, and did her best to raise them as well as she could. At the...