Children can be cruel to their peers – especially if there is a child that is a little different from the majority. Children go through many stages as they grow up. There is the gangly period when the girls physically outpace the boys. The boys then endure the lanky stage where they deal with two left feet while trying to come to terms with the newly discovered rib Adam had lost in the Garden of Eden. Each growth spurt carried it’s own pain for most certainly – if not for all children.
Compound the normal growing pressures by adding something like being obese, and a child can find himself or herself lost in a hell from which he or she can see no escape. Many of us spend a lifetime battling our childhood insecurities. Those of us of a certain age remember cruel jokes and poems. Poems like: “fatty fatty two by four, can’t get through the kitchen door”. As adults we all too often find that the cruelties were not left behind at the school ground doors. They tend follow man through adulthood fed by an ever increasingly judgmental society.
It happened to Two Hundred and Sixty Five (265) pound Ricky Labit and his wife’s...