For some reason it seems our founding mothers and fathers, when deciding how things would go for us, figured we’d all be better off if we took our bountiful, healthy fish stocks, and deep fried them to oblivion, and heck we might as well soak the potatoes in grease and then smother them in gravy while we’re at it.

By 2020 it is expected that almost 15% of us will have diabetes, at an expected cost of 322 million Cathy Bennett bucks annually (or roughly 16,100 libraries).

It is also estimated that 9 out of 10 cases of diabetes is preventable. But prevention requires both education, and motivation. And I think regardless of how much education a person has, if they don’t have the motivation to adopt a sustainably healthy lifestyle, then it’s not gonna happen.

There’s something insidious about diabetes in that it is spoken of in terms of nutrition and blood sugar levels, and that makes it seem like it should be easy to manage. But one of the hardest parts of diabetes are the mood swings.

When your blood sugar spikes, you feel on top of the world, capable of anything, and maybe make rash decisions without any long term foresight. And then with a crash the walls close in. It is a hangover of the worst kind. Hopelessness creeps into your bones, and the littlest thing can set you off in a rage. Neither swing makes it easy to make good decisions.

It would seem that the best way to manage diabetes is one day at a time, with the support of your friends and family, making decisions to maintain a balance. Sometimes when you get a sugar high you keep chasing it because you know the crash is going to be bad. People dealing with alcoholism know this well. But if you have a voice you trust in your ear telling you that bed is a better idea, you’re more likely to turn in.

I am hereby diagnosing our government, not just the current government, but our history of governments, with type 2 governmental diabetes. They are currently dealing with a blood sugar plummeting rapidly from a bad spike, and their strategy is to starve the crash. Anyone with diabetes can tell you this is not the answer.

Our lifeblood is being affected, from health care to libraries, the things we need for information and motivation to manage the things that affect us the most; like our diabetes epidemic.

One of the problems we’re having is that they’ve measured our blood without consideration for the people it belongs to. What we need is restraint, moderation, and wholesome nutrition without any flash.

We need oats, and black beans, and spinach. We need nurses, and teachers, and libraries. We need the modest things that don’t cost the most, that don’t make the flashiest campaign ads, that keep us afloat, to avoid the spike and the crash.

Moderation is what we need from our leaders, but, instead, austerity is what we got from our wealthy, and the diabetic rage is kicking in.We know we can’t get much sugar, but we still have to eat. If you can’t feed us something nutritious then make way for someone who can.