an interesting, and perhaps understudied, development that's unfolding in front of us is a growing divide between those of us who are physically healthy and those of us who are overweight, or otherwise deeply unhealthy.

if you look at the stats, countries like the united states have enough obese people to form a strong voting bloc. it's maybe less true in canada, but it's heading in that direction.

it increasingly seems like the way things are unfolding is that the unhealthy are going to want the state to step in and protect them. this runs the gamut from locking down the society in a weak flu-like pandemic to protect them from getting sick (when everybody else can more or less shrug it off), to perspectives around what the new pseudo-left calls "fat shaming" (and what the literature more generally refers to as informal means of social control). a trend that may develop is that the healthy are going to end up increasingly resentful of the unhealthy, who are mostly that way due to poor lifestyle decisions, and increasingly disinterested in altering their lifestyles to accommodate for them.

i don't think it's fair to characterize this as a conflict between the strong and the weak, for the reason that the obese are going to lean towards the wealthier classes, and the more healthy classes will likely be the poorer ones. so, the model in place is not one of strong, wealthy people altering their lifestyles to protect those of the poor and vulnerable, but rather the healthy poor being forced to adjust to the unhealthy and excessive lifestyles of the upper middle class, the bourgeoisie and the aristocracy. this strong/weak thing is too simple.

but, i've been dealing with this for years, and i'm increasingly frustrated. first, i had the obese retired idiot that insisted on setting the a/c below 20. then, i had the barely less obese "medicinal marijuana" user that was too lazy to smoke outside. i wouldn't be surprised to learn that they're both dead. and, now i have somebody that appears to need the a/c way too low to accommodate for a rather sedentary lifestyle. in each case, it's the same basic problem - i'm healthy and the other person isn't, and we can't tolerate the expectations required of each other to adjust to that difference.

which is to say that we may ultimately have a public health issue at the core of a developing political divide, and a developing problem with people that insist they have the right to be unhealthy, and that everybody else is obliged to accommodate them for it.