Your Fitness Resolution Might Be Easier If You’re Rich, CityLab, 8 January 2019

America’s fitness-center availability tracks closely with key markers of socioeconomic class: income, education, and occupation.

Our very ability to work out and stay fit depends on our class position and where we live. The availability of fitness venues is yet another dimension of America’s great divide along class and geographic lines.

This is why Public Health matters. We want to make sure that people have access to a place to exercise regardless of their class or where they live. “Access” as I often say means more than just physical location. It means financial access, time access, ability access. The former Surgeon General, Dr. Vivek Murthy, before he was unceremoniously fired by Trump, was actively promoting development of safe walking paths.

Dr. Murthy believed in Public Health. Here are a few more things he believed, from his outgoing statement:

• Kindness is more than a virtue. It is a source of strength. If we teach our children to be kind and remind each other of the same, we can live from a place of strength, not fear.
• We will only be successful in addressing addiction – and other illnesses – when we recognize the humanity within each of us. People are more than their disease. All of us are more than our worst mistakes.
• Healing happens when we are able to truly talk to and connect with each other. That means listening and understanding. It means assuming good, not the worst. It means pausing before we judge.
• The world is locked in a struggle between love and fear. Choose love. Always. It is the world’s oldest medicine.

Why would you let go of a person like this?