Play Ball!

First Lady Michelle Obama is teaming up with Major League Baseball to help fight childhood obesity. Wearing her sneakers, she made this announcement at Oriole Park at Camden Yards. It's all a part of the Let's Move campaign, a group that hopes to "raise a healthier generation of kids."
As a part-time PE teacher, I say, "Bravo." I want to believe that each successive generation of humans will to become more and more fit. It makes evolutionary sense that we will continue to weed out the weaklings and only the strong will survive, but maybe we're looking at this through the wrong filter. We've always looked at obesity as if it were a bad thing. Lethargy is discouraged and laying on the couch all day is reprehensible behavior. "Get up and exercise!" we enthuse. "Go play outside!" When we were kids, we didn't have all these indoor distractions to keep us from our prime directive of going out to play.
Perhaps Science has bamboozled us. High blood pressure, breathing problems, and sleeping problems don't seem like such a bad deal when you consider that a sedentary lifestyle could be just the thing to get you master Yoshi's flutter jump. We could be on the verge of developing a generation with massive new thumb strength and exponentially increased capacity for watching things move from left to right on a screen. The potential for diabetes and risk of heart disease might be an additional downside to this choice, but with carefully monitored levels of inactivity, there could be a dozen or more good years of couch time.
Or, maybe a few more laps around the base paths with Mrs. Obama. I guess my real regret in this is the timing. A few weeks ago, she could have nabbed the United States Soccer team to be their spokesthletes. I mean, have you had a look at some of these major leaguers? I guess we need to be careful who we trot out for our role models. At least she didn't pick professional bowlers.