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It was December of 1960, John F. Kennedy was waiting to be sworn in as President, and he had a letter published in Sports Illustrated warning of the impending pussification of America. Over half a century later, many of the things that JFK foreshadowed have come to fruition, and probably worse than he had ever imagined.
Today’s society puts such little emphasis on physical fitness. Most people go through their entire lives without ever having to test themselves, without ever having any need to push their bodies to the limit. Most people will never get into a fight, or have to run for their lives. Today’s world is a lot safer in some ways, but that has many downsides, too.
“Physical fitness is the basis of all the activities of our society,” Kennedy wrote. “And if our bodies grow soft and inactive, if we fail to encourage physical development and prowess, we will undermine our capacity for thought, for work and for the use of those skills vital to an expanding and complex America.”
Even back in the ’60s, the physical fitness of American youth was very alarming…
“Especially disheartening were the results of the five strength tests: 35.7% of American children failed one or more of these, while only 1.1% of the Europeans failed, and among Austrian and Swiss youth the rate of failure was as low as .5%.”
You can point the fingers in a lot of different directions. Certainly, the government’s massive subsidies for corn farmers and the abundance of high-fructose corn syrup doesn’t help. There just isn’t enough food for everyone to feast on organic, grass-fed, free range meals but at the end of the day it comes down to personal accountability.
“But the harsh fact of the matter is that there is also an increasingly large number of young Americans who are neglecting their bodies—whose physical fitness is not what it should be—who are getting soft. And such softness on the part of individual citizens can help to strip and destroy the vitality of a nation.”
Lyndon B. Johnson created the Presidential Fitness Test, but it doesn’t really measure how fit anybody is anymore – it just measures how unfit everybody is, without doing anything to fix the problem.
JFK laid out a 4-point plan on how to eliminate “the Soft American”, check it out on the next page.
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