Once there was a family, a healthy and fairly wealthy family, with many beautiful children who all started life as lovely, chubby little babies. They lived in a beautiful home with big windows and lovely gardens and wide, sweeping lawns.
The family was so happy, and the mother and father loved their beautiful children so much, they decided to give the children a voice in how family decisions were made. They believed that, if the children made their own choices, they would “own” those choices and have “buy-in.”
One day the children came to the parents and said, “We don’t want vegetables at dinner any more. We don’t like the taste of them.”
The parents said, “Well, let us tell you all of the good things vegetables do for you, and then you can decide, how about that?”
And the parents proceeded to tell the children about all of the nutrients that were in carrots, peas, broccoli, beans, corn, and even tomatoes and lettuce and asparagus. They told them how the vitamins would help them have strong bones and teeth and sharp eyes and strong muscles and quick minds. They even explained that the vegetables could be seasoned to taste delicious.
But the children didn’t listen. When the parents were finished, the children said, “We don’t like the taste and nothing you can do will make us like it,” and they voted overwhelmingly to ban vegetables from the family’s diet.
At first the children were happy with their decision. They enjoyed their meats and gravies and pastas and even luscious deserts and salty snacks. But over time, instead of being chubby babies, they became fat children. They began to feel less energetic and their eyesight began to fail. Their parents took them to doctors, and the doctors prescribed expensive drugs, but the children’s health continued to fail.
Other doctors were called in, and these doctors said, “These children need exercise and start feeding them vegetables!” But the children said, “No, no vegetables! We voted against vegetables because we didn’t like the taste of them!”
“But vegetables and exercise will make you better,” the doctors said.
“No, no, no! No vegetables!”
In time, as they grew older, the once witty, vibrant, beautiful children became obese dullards with sour dispositions. As they grew up, they were unable to attract mates, and none of them married. Lacking energy, they couldn’t help their father make repairs on the house or groom the lawns and gardens. Unable to finish their educations, they couldn’t get jobs, and so lived off of the family’s hard-earned fortune. The parents, wearied by supporting their children, grew old and died, leaving the oldest children to run the family.
In short order the now-grown children had used up their once vast fortune. Their house was crumbling around them, and the grounds had become wild and weedy, and they all had to move out of the house. Most of them wandered off, out into a world they were not equipped to live in, constantly in search of food that tasted good.
The children never learned to eat vegetables and, as they died of disease and organ failure, they blamed their parents and other people for not taking better care of them. As the ages passed, people would drive by the rotting house and wretched grounds and ask what had happened, and they neighbors would say, “The children didn’t want to eat vegetables.”
The End.
Mostly Pathos 