I Hate People: Part I

The answer is 36,000.

The question?

How many people died from the flu last year in the United States.

And I mean the plain, old, vomitting, chills, diarahea, I-Really-Wouldn't-Mind-Dying-Right-Now flu that we get every year.

That's 36,000 or 18,000 times more people who have died from The Swine Flu.

I know that the swine flu hype is dying down right now and I'm a week late on this, but I just really hate people these days.

If you have had a five minute conversation with me in your lifetime, you likely know that I like to rage against the masses, but this isn't what this is about. It's about people being stupid, ignorant, fickle, and having a pathetic inability to think rationally.

I know I'm stealing a bit here from Michael Moore, but do those of you in my middle aged tier remember "The Killer Bees?" I think I first heard about The Killer Bees at my bus stop from one of The Musto Twins in second grade and I must say, I was horrified. But, I hope you can excuse me because I was, after all, 8.

But what ever happened to those Killer Bees that were coming up here from Guatemala or El Salvador or Mexico or whatever? Other than Hollywood making a movie of this (and I remember a group of kids being trapped on a bus, which is pretty much exactly how I envisioned it in y 8 year old imagination), they never showed up? Why? Probably because there was no such thing. But the more likely reason is that if you think about it, THERE IS NO WAY THERE CAN POSSIBLY BE KILLER BEES THAT WILL OVERRUN AMERICA AND KILL EVERYONE THEY COME INTO CONTACT WITH!!!

I mean, do you know anything about bees because I do not. But what I do know is that they do not travel thousand of miles across the world in massive swarms. Usually, they buzz about their nest in a garage and occassionally saunter over to a nearby pool to make sunbathers have a 15 second freak out. But what they do not do is FLY ACROSS CONTINENTS TO ATTACK KIDS WAITING AT BUS STOPS IN BURLINGTON, MASSACHUSETTS.

And then there's been other stuff that people panic about that make me crack up. Remember Y2K (imagine the US Government being so idiotic that a computer glitch would make planes come crashing to the ground), anthrax (this is still Justin Timberlake's career low... Admitting that he purchased Cipro on the black market because he feared Anthrax... And not because they were brining the noise), or the school wide searches that went on after Columbine (where did those metal detectors go?)? Then there was Mad Cow disease, Glade Plug Ins causing fires, cell phones randomly exploding, and myriad other preposterous myths that never amounted to anything.

Now, we have Swine Flu. Like Jules Winfield, I don't dig on swine. And like Jerry Seinfeld, I hate people.

I just amazes me that people continue to not have the ability to freely think for themselves and they buy into these utterly ridiculous myths, notions, scares, and panics. Is Swine Flu real? Most certainly? Are you going to catch it? Absolutely not. And if my Lowell readers manage to (don that mask Molly, Matt, Julie, and Little Jerry) catch Swine Flu, do you know what will happen to them? They will feel like shit for aa few days, get to miss a bunch of days of work, and get a forced diet that will give them wash board abs because they can't eat anything.

There's a lot to blame for this panic, including The Fifth Estate, which you all know I long to be a part of. But they have a responsibility to report on this, just as the government has a responsibility to protect us from it and warn us about it. I understand both of those pieces.

But can't people take this information and act a bit more rationally? Are more people OCD than I thought? Are tons of people germ-a-phobes and I just can't see it? Are people maybe more concerned about their health than I am? The answer to all of these questions is probably yes and although I'll never be able to enter someones mind and understand what it is like to truly fear being sick, it continues to amaze me that people are unable to just cool out.

It seems like that the "epidemic" is coming to an end and I hear the WHO (do they sing "Baba O'Riley?") are thinking about downgrading the scare, but I want to know more about the people who bought into this scare and wear face masks. Will they later be embarrased that they wore a face mask? Will they think they are losers for skipping a trip to Mexico in the same way that I think I am a loser for wearing pegged Skidz in 1992?

Or do they think they "did the right thing?" Do they think their precautions were just and proper? Like the people who bought duct tape and plastic in 2001, do they think they were just in their fears?

And that's more the fascination with this Swine Flu thing: The people who are scared of it.

I want to like people and respect their opinions. Really, I do. But in times like this, I just can't. But I guess that's what makes people people. We are all different.

Because if there were a world of me, we wouldn't hav made it much past the protizoa stage of development.