Politics & Power Quote by Lois Capps

A policy problem disguised as a lament, Capps opens with a statistic that feels tame until you hear the indictment inside it: childhood has been engineered into sedentary dependence. “Mr. Speaker” signals the real audience isn’t the chamber so much as the public record - a bid to turn everyday habits into legislative urgency. The “less than 10 percent” isn’t just data; it’s a moral barometer, a way of framing walking to school as a lost norm rather than an optional lifestyle choice.

The line works because it yokes two arenas adults like to treat separately: infrastructure and diet. Kids don’t walk because streets are hostile, commutes are long, and parents are scared; kids eat junk because institutions outsource responsibility. By placing bicycles and cafeterias in the same breath, Capps makes the subtext unavoidable: we have built an environment that nudges children toward illness, then act surprised at the results.

“Invite” is the quiet knife. Schools aren’t merely tolerating fast food; they’re hosting it, normalizing it, often in exchange for revenue or convenience. That single verb turns vending contracts into a values question: what does it mean when the place tasked with education also markets calories?

Context matters: this is late-20th/early-21st-century health politics, when childhood obesity became a national anxiety and “personal responsibility” rhetoric often drowned out structural fixes. Capps’ intent is to drag responsibility back upstream - toward policy, budgets, zoning, and school governance - where the problem is actually being produced.