Without going into the painstaking details of the study and its conclusions, I’ll leave the summarization to Sean Banville whose book entitled, 1000 Ideas & Activities for Language Teachers from BreakingNewsEnglish.com used the study as a lesson in English reading comprehension. The idea is that English teachers use the current headlines or breaking news in the media as a learning tool and forum of discussion with their students. Banville summed up the obesity report entitled “Graffiti, greenery, and obesity in adults: secondary analysis of European cross sectional survey” thusly, “People who live in more pleasant and attractive environments, which in our study was assessed by levels of greenery, are much more likely to be physically active and not to be overweight or obese. Conversely, in less attractive areas, those with lots of graffiti, litter and dog mess, people are more likely to be overweight or obese and to take less exercise.” The team suggested that: “the likelihood of being more physically active is about 50 per cent less, and the likelihood of being overweight or obese is about 50 per cent higher” in poorer neighborhoods. They concluded: “In efforts to promote physical activity and reduce weight…attention should be paid to environmental facilitators and barriers as well as individual factors.”

Surprised? I know it all seems a wee bit convoluted at this point graffiti, obesity and BreakingNewsEnglish.com but the point I’m desiring to make is this: One, the study is if you truly think about it, utterly ridiculous even if it is trying to “draw” some conclusions about what may contribute to obesity. The fact of the matter is how about all the other social factors that lead to poor neighborhoods, lack of jobs, poor education, unemployment, poor health care, language, culture, income, lack of exercise, Super Size Me menus, sugar, American “culture” ad naseum – gee, I wonder if all those things combined doesn’t account for a certain apathy? A certain laissez-faire? A certain lack of motivation? It certainly makes me want to go out and run a couple of miles in my new Nikes while dodging all the drive-by shootings, dog shit and syringes. I wonder if there are not larger issues to be dealt with within our inner city neighborhoods to make life a little bit easier for everyone or should we just bus everyone out to the suburbs and let them run in the parks? Second, graffiti has been a scapegoat for too long now and has been held responsible for all the social ills and insecurity in American and European cities – this perception has got to stop. Yes I know, guns don’t kill people, people kill people but one thing’s for sure, guns don’t make you fat. Look, the only thing that makes anyone anywhere feel insecure when they’re looking at a very nice piece on the wall is freedom. The freedom they recognize in the act and how little control they have over their lives. Thirdly, a total misunderstanding and lack of comprehension about what graffiti is, what it does, the purpose it serves and most importantly, how it relates to its writers. Graffiti is far from being an indicator of a poor quality of life for anyone anywhere. A clear example of this is Art as Authority’s good fortune to have one of the finest graffiti writers out on the streets and on this blog. KAI1 has positioned himself in a very short time as one of the most lucid and clear thinkers in the graffiti world today. KAI has been posting here regularly and has been giving us all some very invaluable lessons. It would behoove you to check out what he has to say.

To conclude, what I even find more astonishing is Banville’s use of the study as a test and forum of discussion for a English class in which he finds himself an unwitting champion of word play, media spin and associations of graffiti=bad, negative, punishable, impoverished or any number of synonyms that “influence” the reader’s understanding of the truth or a truth as outlined in the study, while reinforcing all the negative views in general about graffiti. What are we supposed to learn from this, graffiti is bad and poverty is good? Am I missing something here?

I have since used part of Banville’s lesson in his own phraseology and turned it into a polling of questions out of simple curiosity, in order to see what others think about graffiti and what relation it has to their environment and/or well-being. Give me your opinion, I would like to know. Or to sum it up nicely, KAI said after being emailed the study, “this shit is really rad - I have a lot of fat friends.”