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| Yes | 71% | 665 votes | Total: 933 votes | |
| No | 29% | 268 votes |
Yes
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Add to FavoritesYou know, I've been putting off responding to this topic for a while. It takes a lot for me to want to reply to something and commenting on laziness makes me even more apathetic.
It cannot be denied that Americans are lazy. This can be attributed to quite a few factors:
Bad Diet
While it is true that obesity is a problem in the United States, one cannot fully blame the American public themselves. When you see nothing by ads for fast food on Tv, and are usually within walking distance (who am I kidding? It's driving distance) from a convenience store selling chips, soda, and other bad foods it's easy to develop bad eating habits.
Tv
In the past thirty years we've gone from having about 3-7 channels to over 500. People don't even have to leave the house to rent movies anymore. They can be delivered to your door from companies like NetFlix or you can just push a button on your remote and get it digitally sent to your cable box. If you're hungry you can just call out for pizza and have it delivered right to your door unfortunately, you still have to get up to "answer the door It's Dominos!"
Internet
In the old days if you wanted to meet someone new, you'd go to a place to socialize like a bar, nightclub, bookstore, or the park. Now, you can meet people in a chat-room and make friends with people you've never met. If you want to see them, you can hook up a webcam (although, some avoid that if they're affected by "Bad Diet" above).
24 Hour News
Before the advent of the internet and CNN you either got your news from the 6 O'clock (5 central and mountain) news or the newspaper. You could get everything you needed to know in just 30 minutes. Whatever they left out you had to figure out on your own. Political decisions were made from your own research. Now, you've got three 24 hour news services competing to tell you what they believe the truth is. If you want, you could get on the internet to look up the real truth, but that would require walking all the way over to your computer, turning it on, going to the websitesI'm getting tired just thinking of it.
Cars
This has been a trend for years in the US. Nobody walks anywhere anymore. If you want to go somewhere you hop into your car and drive as fast as you can (even if it's only a block away!) and do whatever.
Complacency
None of the points I've brought up is a revelation. Everyone knows that it's the truth, but they just don't care. They've gotten themselves into their little ruts and are content to stay this way.
So, the question is: If these people are content with the way they are, why can't everyone else be?
Learn more about this author, David Furritus.
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No
First of all, allow me to state that I am a Singaporean, thus an outsider, and just stating an outsider's point of view.
On television, I've seen hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, September 11th, the fires in California and the soldiers in Iraq. Whoever said that Americans were lazy obviously have been missing out on the larger picture. Let's take an example of hurricane Katrina. Let's bear in mind all the rescue workers and re-builders that helped to save people's lives. Is it fair to call them lazy? The firefighters in both the 9/11 and Californian fires, is it fair to call them lazy? I think not. These people were not famous stars or celebrities. They were average hardworking Americans that saw a need to help and took steps towards doing that.
Secondly, many success stories and famous names all come from America. You name it. Bill Gates, Donald Trump, Warren Buffett, and so on and so forth. I barely scratched the tip of the iceberg. Did these people achieve what they did by being lazy? Definitely not. To add to that, these people were once average people on the streets too. It's the hard work they put in that enabled them to get to where they are today.
Third and lastly, being fat does not equate to being lazy. Some people are fat not because of their own choice, but perhaps by a certain illness or upbringing. That doesn't automatically make them lazy does it? A person may be fat, but that same person may work his ass off at his job. Statistics prove that Americans are getting fatter and have obesity related diseases but do these same statistics prove that they are lazy? Laziness is not defined by how inactive you are in doing physical exercises. I can eat a lot, be fat, not exercise much but spend most of my time on my work and struggling to make ends meet for my family. Is that being lazy? Is it right, under such a circumstance to call me lazy just because I don't exercise?
Thus, majority of average Americans are actually quite hardworking, just that the few who really are lazy gave them a bad name and stereotyping along with it.
Learn more about this author, Jeremiah Ding.
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