The New York Times, of course, tracked down the people who made being bullied in middle school a core part of their personalities and let them go on about why they don't like the return of fitness standards that just made them feel bad.
Ivory Burnett, a 41-year-old, said it was too military, that it was too hard. She was a fat kid, and exercising was too difficult; it was even harder to be forced to do it in front of the other kids. She said she "never did a pull-up."
I never did, either, but my cousin got multiple awards for his skills. And while Ivory apparently just hung there on the bar and told jokes, I hope that more kids today can do better than either of us.
It was Barack Obama who tanked the fitness test in 2012, even as his wife Michelle launched a fitness program called "Let's Move!" as part of her First Lady initiative. She promoted healthier lifestyles and anti-obesity measures while her husband pushed a personal tracking program called the FitnessGram, and no awards were given out for achievement.
For many of us, as the Times suggests, the Presidential Fitness Test was "an early introduction to public humiliation." But that's not a good enough reason to do away with it—in fact, better to get introduced to humiliation early than later in life when you're too soft to handle it.
That's part of why Lyndon B. Johnson launched the initiative in 1966—he saw Americans getting soft after the war years and wanted to toughen young Americans up.
School isn't a place where kids are supposed to be coddled or gently nurtured: it's a place where you're supposed to learn things that you need in life. One thing a person definitely needs in life is to know how to handle humiliation.
You will be humiliated in life. That's just a fact. Having someone try to save you from being humiliated is also humiliating. It's good to know how to deal with it.
I personally found the Presidential Fitness Test to be stressful. I'd go into it knowing full well I would probably be the worst, even worse than the fat kids.
I had no strength, no agility, and spent most of my free time leisurely riding my bike around my suburban town, trying to find a good place to sit under a tree and read while eating Gobstoppers.
When we had to read aloud in English class, I read faster and more clearly than the other kids. I never stumbled over my words; I knew what they all meant.
Other kids would stammer, stutter, their cheeks burning red when inevitably they encountered words they'd never seen before. All those kids beat me in the Presidential Fitness Test.
In bringing back the dreaded annual test of strength, Trump said in the order that it was due to "the threat to the vitality and longevity of our country that is posed by America's declining health and physical fitness."
RFK Jr. said he liked the test when he was a kid. "It was a huge item of pride when I was growing up, and we need to re-instill that spirit of competition and that commitment to nutrition and physical fitness," he said.
My cousin was proud of his awards, too. The top 15 percent of American kids got one, it was signed by the president, and everything. I thought it was cool, I even coveted an award for myself—but not enough to go out there and try harder.
One former elementary schooler interviewed by the Times said the competition "was survive or fail. It was Darwinist." And it was, but that's pretty much at least half the point.
Not every kid is going to do great at the Presidential Fitness Test. Some kids will take the humiliation and embarrassment they feel at failure and use it to spur them on to do better, climb higher, run faster.
Others will say "whatever" and move on to what they are good at, realizing that being humiliated in an arena in which you have no stake is not really that bad.
Both of these are lessons worth learning, and let's face it, all of us could stand to toughen up.
