I think the Swine Flu should have been called something
else. I think it would have been
much more popular an illness if it had been named after something less popular
than the blessed beast who brings us bacon. I think more people would have met this disease with scorn
if they had just called it spinach flu or broccoli flu; Casey would like it to
be called the corn flu. We could
have named it after an animal that isn’t as cute or useful as pigs are, or can
be. Would anyone have objected to
it being called the rat flu or the ferret flu? They should have tacked on “guinea” to pig flu and everyone
would have been agreeable.
I think they should have called it the donkey flu, because everyone around me has been acting like a jackass. There are people who are incredibly nonchalant about any public health risk that they impose upon the rest of us and then there are people who overreact. There are people who have always and will always just cough at you without covering up. I am doing that currently so we’ll turn the air conditioning on so that I’m not assaulted by my allergies while I sleep. Then there are people who’ve broken out their SARS masks from back-in-the-day and are wearing them to work and McDonald’s.
I love the opportunity to constantly, constantly wash my
hands. I have washed my hands
several times before even getting to this paragraph. I am enjoying using hand-sanitizing lotions even if that is
actually a dangerous practice. I
wash my hands after using the lotions as well because you’ve killed the germs
but they’re still on your hands and I have no proof they’re dead so I need to
wash them off my hands. Also,
people are not looking at me like a freak when I wash my hands all the time or
at least I am not as paranoid about it.
These are amazing silver linings for me.
There
are some other silver linings to the cloud of the swine flu. We cannot blame this on George W. Bush
or the Republican Party or on Barack Obama and the Democrats. If it could be linked intelligently to
the Republicans or if there were a witty way to link this to the twenty-third
letter I would have already done it.
We’ve fallen into the bad habit of knee-jerk blaming
he-who-falls-between-v-and-x and his retinue for everything instead of trying
to learn a lesson from the event.
This also gives us good practice for what we might and might not do when
something like this happens again, if we survive this epidemic and don’t all
die. I had a third thing because
that’s how I roll by I forgot it while I was washing my hands.
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