H1N1…By Any Other Name Will Still Be Swine Flu To Me
There are compromises you’re forced to make when you live in a society. And today, humanity has pretty much made it an impossibility to live without being affected by one or more. Our overcrowding has forced us together and made drawing lines of separation difficult, even in an emergency, a life or death situation.
Major issues such as the flu outbreak brings out some of the more frustrating and moronic aspects of the modern manners of governance. I understand that my state governor feels he pretty much has to get on television and reassure people that the powers that be have things under control. They don’t. The lie is so blatant that it almost defies logic until you remember that we live alongside people who can’t comprehend basic ideas about science and math, who will follow complex conspiracy theories out beyond all scope of reality but feel they can ignore an actual threat, give it no importance whatsoever in their lives until their child’s school is closed.
Antivirals were delivered around the state today under armed escort by police. We have no land pirates here, no one yet bent on panic driven raids on medical stockpiles. It is with bitter irony that I watch us being told remain calm when the situation is absolutely not ok. While panic never helps, raising a decent amount of alarm absolutely does. That isn’t being done enough. People will die from this due to the overly cautious way the authorities present information. Random applications of hand sanitizer will not save you.
I understand why the federal governments spokespeople claim the president hasn’t been tested, even though he was in the area of initial infection at the time it was becoming the flu epicenter. Anyone with a brain knows that either he has been tested and history books will report later why we were told otherwise. Most likely, he and his family have been pumped full of antivirals since his return. Those in charge of his health need not bother to test in that case and in that way can ensure the administration deniability while still acting to protect the nation’s leader/figurehead.
I can even barely stomach the fact that world health organizations want the illness referred to as H1N1 instead of swine flu to save the confusion of the ignorant and the mass slaughter of animals. Those who are foolish on that grand a scope are not going to be swayed by a name change. For some countries, ridiculous measures like mass slaughter are what you do to reassure your populace. Every one of the major countries has done this, it just wasn’t over pigs and flu. I have no pity for pork producers who will ultimately have to answer for their practices, even if they pay only through lost profits. Whether directly responsible for this outbreak or not, their methods are reprehensible.
Part of me wishes we could all stop the charade. The greatest threat to humanity is humanity itself. You will never hear how we should mass cull any of our disease ridden selves for the greater good. Overreaction, misinformed action, and superstitious nonsense rules our efforts as much as it ever has. We are pridefully, woefully uninformed and undereducated and yet completely sure we know what is right. We crowd ourselves into every available inch of land, push out the natural systems, and then wonder why it all went wrong.
We all must also be kept up to date on every possible aspect of what is happening. That is why we allow our reporters, camera crews and personnel to travel right into the heart of the epidemic in order to give us two minutes of evening news. I feel so much better seeing a familiar face standing on a busy street in Mexico or an American reporter frolicking with patient zero, don’t you? Um, do they plan to return to the states soon? Will they be isolated and quarantined before being allowed to return to their important jobs in large metro areas? No? I think I sense a problem here. A complete lack of sense.
If we all somehow manage to stumble into a future, I hope that we can take a few lessons away from the current cultures and practices and improve upon things. Take simple steps like not treating other living creatures as if they serve us, as if they have no more feelings than inanimate objects or needs beyond the basics to sustain life. Grossly large populations of animals crowded into a factory farm cannot and will not be monitored for illness or disease in an effective manner. It is bad for the animals, ruins their meat, and is bad for the human beings who work in, live near, and consume the products of such facilities.
Control human breeding instead of animal breeding. For Christ’s sake, set some limits. Educate people before you allow them to procreate. Understand that adding to the population doesn’t mean you value life more. Perhaps we should all take a moment to contemplate why we push for people to marry and have children, why we reward that course of action above and beyond any other, why we are falsely taught that any other life is empty, shameful, and not worthwhile.
Don’t leave your infrastructure to rot. Don’t hope the next disaster will wait until you’re dead or no longer serving in office. Don’t wait for help from the government, the state, your town. If you have even a small amount of wisdom about how a virus circulates and changes, if you know that vaccine is a vital part of stopping the spread, make sure your country keeps a facility or two or three or more around capable of producing one when you need one. That might be at the top of your emergency preparedness plans, if you’re smart. America, not so much.
Thank you, Mexico, for your willingness to step up and shut down your cities when it was obviously called for. You may have been a bit slower than I’d have liked to see, but you acted far more responsibly than have other governments.
This round of flu will probably fade and everyone will breathe a sigh of relief. They will begin to ignore the calls to be vigilant about the flu season to come. We pretend to it, but don’t actually learn anything history attempts to teach us. We are willfully ignorant. Frankly, we deserve what we get because we live in a mess of our own making.