Many of you may have heard of the recent moratorium the Los Angeles City Council placed on fast food restaurants in East LA. For the next year, no fast food restaurants in East LA are to be opened or remodeled. This is all in an attempt to curb the growing percentage of residents classified as overweight. For the moment, I will move past the fact that exceptions were carved out for several chains or that fast food offers a cheap meal in what is one of America’s poorest urban areas. I will even ignore the fact that those who introduced this moratorium would die before instituting a moratorium on flag burning or any other such speech. What I will, instead, focus on is the alive and well sense of unabated paternalism in our society.

Paternalism is the most arrogant form of elitism. Instead of thinking as one’s self simply as superior, a paternalist believes him or herself to be so superior as to not only know more than you but to actually know what is best for you. Sometimes the result is tragic, such as past attempts to “civilize” Native Americans and the cultural destruction that followed. However, in paternalism’s defense, the outcome is not usually so detrimental and sometimes manages to do some good. But this is not about paternalism in our past, but about its presence in society today.

With the recent decision by the Los Angeles City Council, we are seeing just how unintentionally patronizing a well-meaning group of people can be. By instituting this moratorium on fast food restaurants, the City Council is telling the people of East LA that they are too dumb to be trusted to choose what they eat. If that is not insulting, I do not know what is. It is not as sinisterly Orwellian as it might appear at first, but rather more degrading and demeaning the longer you dwell on it. It is almost unfathomable to think of how much hubris it takes for an elected body to strip its constituents of their freedom to make a simple choice. The people of East LA do not deserve to be talked down to as if they were petulant children. Equal society starts with our elected bodies treating everyone like an adult.

East Los Angeles has a great many problems. The area is economically depressed and has some of the highest violent crime rates in the country. I will not say what can or cannot be done to remedy these problems, only that these problems are much more detrimental to a community than anything on the McDonald’s Value Menu. I am not saying that community health is not important or that the obesity is not a major problem, but we all know fast food is bad for us. Is it that the City Council believes the people of East LA have been tricked? Have they been forcibly coerced? Or are they simply too slow to render an educated decision based on both personal preference and widely available information? Regardless of the benevolent thought process that bore out this new policy, it is obvious that the Los Angeles City Council feels the people of East LA are incapable of making decisions for themselves. Is such condescension really progress?