The world has a fascination with being sick. Right now the latest craze is the Swine Flu. Over the past couple of years the world has run from cows that have gone mad, birds with the same problem as the pigs, flour that fell into people's envelopes as they were baking, and that weird acronym that Asia fell in love with.
The media has played an important role in the spread of the fear. With nothing happening in politics, and the sports world shifting towards the boring boys of summer, there aren't enough stories to fill the 40 minutes of nightly news coverage. Enter the swine flu pandemic.
Now we can re-use the maps from the election and have nightly updates on which states have been infected. We can break out the funny masks left over from SARS to scare people again. We require good hygene from the population by telling them washing their hands will prevent the spread. We also get to kill off herds of animals that have been infected, just like we did to the cows. Could you imagine us treating the sick population of humans like we treat the sick animals? We cause people to fear their neighbors and tell them to avoid contact with others, just like people feared their mailboxes during the anthrax craze. Too much attention has been given to one topic.
I see more and more kids trying to act sick because now if they can convince others they are sick, they not only miss a day of school but the whole district gets shut down. They get to have a sick day for two weeks with all of their friends! Convince your employer you have it and the whole store gets shut down.
As a society we fail to miss the big pictures. The swine flu has maybe killed 100 people since its discovery. Cancer and AIDS are much more severe problems. Do we need to come up with some weird animal combination name for cancer to become popular. I guess we will run in fear from cancer when we hear the media announce that horse cancer has begun to spread among humans. I think more people were fascinated with AIDS when they found out it originally came from monkeys. What is next - pandabear acne?
Wow! Stevey, I really like this. Imagine a world where the media addressed poverty, education, progress, theories, consumerism, etc., where newpapers ENCOURAGED people to take action! Somethings wrong with our economy? Blame the government! I hate it when I hear people talk like this. The government isn't our economy, nor is it our babysitter. It is an aid, only. Why don't I hear more about production? That's what it really comes down to. I once had a Chinese professor who said that how well the American economy does has nothing to do with how well we are actually doing, but how well we THINK we are doing. He's so right. And the real issue isn't going to get fixed until we turn back to that solid foundation: productivity of individuals.
ReplyDeleteCan't get a job? Don't blame companies. Start your own business and become yourself an employer! Somebody had to do it. I don't like this idea of entitlement we as a society have.
As for our sick paranoia, I agree with my brother's philosophy that exposing yourself to our dirty world only makes you immune! It's the kids who live in sterilized houses of paranoid parents that are having problems with alergies. My roomates are always telling me to not touch raw chicken or eat aged food because it will make me sick. To heck with that! I'm still alive and believe it or not, after all those times of touching raw chicken, I have never had samonilla (or however the heck you spell it)!. I'll go live my life, play in mud, while the rest of the world gets laser surgery and lives in voluntary quarantines.
Did anyone play Sim City when they were kids? You know how you could tell you were doing really good when the city people were complaining about the taxes? Apparently we're doing good when we're carrying on about the next plague. Except weren't not doing that good...poverty's still out there, and we're not talking about it.