While on my way to Ellsworth recently, I passed an ominous advertisement outside a local health club. The billboard suggested that failure to exercise regularly was the equivalent of smoking half a pack of cigarettes a day.

After quickly reassuring myself that I had already completed my daily swim, a deeper concern soon overwhelmed me: Why don’t we do more to help the sedentary masses? Reading the Bar Harbor Times’ police beat column provides comforting evidence about our new solicitude for the other health pariahs of our era, young smokers. Our police regularly apprehend underage smokers, and our courts fine them. School boards lend a helping hand by expelling them from local schools.

It’s about time, too, with all the harm smoking does to their lungs and my health insurance premiums. Nonetheless, if both smoking and slothfulness are so deleterious to our social and personal health, by what logic do we allow the sedentary to walk freely — rather than run — among us? And wouldn’t Maine’s large number of underage smokers feel better about kicking their noxious habits if they knew that other Mainers engaging in equally risky behaviors were changing their ways?

In an era of escalating health costs and declining social morality, I think it is time to take the sins of the sedentary more seriously. Since the most dangerous behaviors occur during the holiday season, I urge the governor to call a special session of the legislature to enact an emergency program. Maine might thereby become a beacon to inert citizens everywhere.

Since one’s never too young to start proper health habits, every person above the age of five should be required to carry a personal fitness card (PFC). The PFC would have space for regular electronically imprinted updates. These would prove that each citizen has done his or her requisite level of monthly training and displayed an appropriate level of conditioning at some local fitness facility. After all, why should stress testing be a monopoly of the cardiology establishment?

If personal health is to be more than an ad campaign, every citizen has a patriotic duty to provide ongoing proof of a healthy lifestyle. Since small government, like a thin waist, is the rage these days, we must of course avoid creating new government bureaucracies — except for the prisons to hold the truly reprobate.

Grocery stores must become the front lines in the new health wars. As it is now, if I want to buy beer at the local Shop ‘n Save, I must at least prove that I am old enough. Under Maine’s current policies, however, any 12-year-old can walk in off the street and, regardless of his or her physical condition, buy a virtually unlimited number of whoopie pies, a potent entry level food. I would suggest that purchasers of anything more dangerous than broccoli, tangerines, and brown rice be required to display their PFC to prove they are cardiovascularly sound citizens. Forging PFCs should be a felony. Conviction for three such felonies should warrant life in prison — on a ration of oatmeal bread and water.

Grocery stores of course can’t win the health wars all by themselves. Each of us must begin to assume more responsibility not only for our own lifestyles but for the behavior of our fellows. Unfortunately, even exercise and low lipid levels arent enough. Well documented studies now also show that body-mass index is another powerful indicator of personal longevity. This consideration suggests a further social innovation. Regular weigh-ins shouldn’t be limited simply to trucks on the interstates or those macho prefight displays on ESPN. Admission to all restaurants should be dependent on passing a body-mass index test administered at the front door. To prevent restaurants from becoming halls of Epicurean excess, it probably would be prudent to administer the test after meals as well.

Patriotic citizens might voluntarily install weigh-in facilities in their own dining rooms for dinner guests. Superpatriotic restaurants and households could even consider providing basement gym space — with required counseling — for departing guests who flunked the weigh-out. The most devoted families might well form a new public interest organization, Mainers Concerned about Fat (McFat). McFat could lobby school boards. There’s nothing more dangerous than sluggardly and indulgent teenagers setting bad examples for their peers. If school boards don’t get the message, McFat could place zero-fat-tolerance initiatives on state ballots.

Besides the obvious incentives for better lifestyles, these proposals offer a number of ancillary social benefits. Wealthy consumers have inordinate access to “rich” foods. But under these proposals, they would pay an even higher price for their opulent banquets. They would need to buy more scales. They might even have to hire more poor, thin, and underfed citizens to pick up meals for them at take-out restaurants. Trickle down economics thus might finally establish its validity.

As Maine goes, so goes the nation. Getting hooked on aerobic and nutritional training would some day make America more competitive in future Olympics. And with all those smokers and other heavy breathers either reformed or behind bars, our businesses would trounce the nicotine-and-brie-ravaged elites of Japan and Western Europe.

John Buell is a political economist who lives in Southwest Harbor.