Up & Coming Weekly

JANUARY 20-26, 2010 UCW 5 WWW.UPANDCOMINGWEEKLY.COM MARGARET DICKSON, Contributing Writer COMMENTS? 484-6200 ext. 222 or editor@upandcomingweekly.com. Our Collective Lives by MARGARET DICKSON Hello. My name is Margaret and I am a news junkie. I can remember debating issues and current events with my seventh- grade friends at "Teen Club," a weekly occasion on Friday evenings in the lower level of the Lyons Club on Rowan Street in downtown Fayetteville. I suspect we knew very little about what we were talking about, but we were earnest and passionate in our conversations. My discussions may be a bit more informed these days, but my interest in our common life and how we approach our challenges remains strong. Among my early jobs was radio news reporter, a job with crazy hours and many surprises. I adored it. Newspapers, magazines and other news programming are the wallpaper of my life, so much so that my daughter once informed me that I needed to know more about popular culture in television programming. As an afterthought, she stuck her head back in the room to add that "watching CNN does not count!" It is probably too late to teach this old dog new tricks on that score, and I continue to read and watch most anything that crosses my path. This month, two stories caught my interest particularly, both stories which resonate within our community. The fi rst is one we know instinctively and well — the stress felt by military spouses when their partners are deployed to war zones, often for longer periods then the families had expected and often on multiple tours. We all know these spouses. They are our friends and neighbors, our co-workers, our fellow church members and their children are our children's friends. The real news is the numbers. They come from a dissertation written by Alyssa J. Mansfield at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill's Gillings School of Global Public Health and published in the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine. Mansfield's work looked at the electronic medical records of more than 250,000 military wives whose husbands were deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan at least once between 2003 and 2006. Her study did not include husbands of deployed women. Not surprisingly, the wives' records showed significantly higher diagnoses of mental-health conditions than those of women whose husbands have not been deployed, about 37 percent to 30 percent. The disorders included depression, sleep disorders and anxiety. All of us hear and read about — and some of us know — soldiers who have returned from war zones suffering the effects of their service, both physically and mentally. Unlike in past confl icts, most soldiers today are married, but the effects of their service on their spouses are less documented. Mansfi eld's work has given us additional insight into war's toll on spouses. It can help us look differently and more compassionately at our friends who are going it alone while their husbands offer the ultimate sacrifi ce for all of us. The issue of obesity is certainly no secret, and certainly not in the southeastern United States which has some of the highest rates of obesity in our nation. I was fl abbergasted nevertheless to read that North Carolina's own Rowan County, a county whose largest town is Salisbury, lists obesity as its top health concern. In its health assessment to state offi cials done every four years, Rowan County health workers listed obesity ahead of other serious health concerns such as access to health care and pre-natal care, minority health disparities and access to dental care, tobacco use and teenage pregnancy — all issues of signifi cance throughout North Carolina. Rowan County health offi cials report that one third of children, and as many as three-fourths of the county's adults, are either overweight or obese. If Rowan County offi cials are assessing accurately, they should be concerned, and so should the rest of us. The state obesity rate for teenagers was 29.9-percent in 2007, but it was a less startling 26.5-percent only four years earlier in 2003. Reasons Rowan offi cials list for the growing hefty population include unhealthy eating habits passed generation to generation (think families who eat no vegetables and who believe fruit comes in cans), large portions in fast- food restaurants (think supersize), a culture of "Southern cooking" (think fried chicken, cornbread and sticky-sweet iced tea) and a busy lifestyle (think about our own). None of us can control anyone's behavior but our own, of course, but we can set examples. If our children see us enjoying a green salad or even a stalk of broccoli, maybe they will try them as well. If we nix an offi ce outing for pizza, maybe our co-workers will think about healthier options. If dessert is berries or an apple instead of ice cream with chocolate sauce, maybe someone will get the message. What I have learned about good health over a life time of positives and negatives is that achieving it is a process not an event, and that we can always do better. So much for this news junkie's take on what is going on with all of us in this New Year. THIS WEEK WITH MARGARET THIS WEEK WITH MARGARET FLORENCE CIVIC CENTER PRESENTS A Photographic Tribute to Soldiers and Marines from the Civil War to the War In Iraq on display now through February 2, 2010. Special thanks to 3300 WEST RADIO DRIVE • FLORENCE, SC • 843-679-9417 • www.fl orenceciviccenter .com Disabled American Veterans Day Purple Heart Society Day January 23, 2010 • 11 a.m. Please join us for this special honoring! Open to the public Guest speakers: Cpl. Roldolfo Hernandez-Congressional Medal of Honor recipient MG Stanhope Spears-Adjutant General of South Carolina Entertainment: The Citadel Regimental Band & Pipes & RiÁ e Legion Drill Team Admission is free!

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