Sundays At Six is on hiatus!

Dear Readers,

First of all, thank you for reading my blog over the last few months. Whether you read every week or have only popped in once, thanks for checking it out.

Sundays At Six will be on hiatus this summer, as I will be bicycling across the United States with the organization Bike and Build. I'll have limited access to Internet and less energy at the end of long cycling days, but I will be keeping a blog about my travels. It won't be the political commentary of Sundays At Six but instead a travelogue of my journey across the country and a journal of my experiences building houses with the affordable organizations we'll help out along the way.

Check out my blog at http://abbycoasttocoast.blogspot.com. I'll post as often as I can and try to include plenty of pictures.

Have a great summer!

Thanks so much,

Abby

These days coughing in public can earn you looks of poor-concealed contempt. I know because I’ve been fighting a cold for the better part of a week, which has coincidentally coincided with the explosion of swine flu hysteria. Whatever I have is nasty and spreading prodigiously around campus, but it is not, I promise, swine flu. When I went to the health center to get checked out I was shocked to many of the students waiting were wearing surgical masks. While the waiting room was no doubt full of icky ills I think the surgical mask is a bit drastic. I considered making a joke about swine flu, but thought better of it. I think making a joke about swine flu at the health center is rather like joking about bombs at the airport.

By the way, I realize it’s not called swine flu any more. But I’m a creature of habit, and H1N1 just doesn’t have the same ring to it. Whatever it is—swine flu, H1N1, influenza A—it is causing some funny behavior in humans.

Of course I believe that contagious illnesses are not to be taken lightly, especially when an illness is both contagious and deadly. But the alarmist headlines and non-stop coverage are doing nothing to help the situation. Fear mongering in the media has reached a fever pitch.

Fear-inducing propaganda is certainly nothing new. Our country has turned it in to an art beginning with the Salem witch trials, moving along at a steady clip right up until the color-coded terrorist alert scheme. I’m a frequent traveler, and never once has it been less than “orange.” Have we really been at “high risk of terrorist attacks” for 8 years? Although the most disturbing aspect of the chart is that “no risk” is not an option. Even the lowest rated color, green, alerts of low risk of terrorist attacks. I suppose a terrorist attack is always a possibility, but so is getting hit by an asteroid, and there isn’t a color-coded warning system for that (yet).

Perhaps humanity’s most visceral emotion, fear makes people do stupid things. Scared people don’t think rationally. Biologically speaking, this is a pretty good plan. When an organism is faced with an imminent threat, its ability to drop everything and assume a “fight-or-flight” mentality helps ensure survival. But what is an imminent threat? And who decides?

One of the biggest advantages of the hyper-connectivity age is the quick dissemination of news. In an emergency situation, the ubiquity of cell phones and the internet can help save lives. While there were many problems which created the situation of the bubonic plague, one wonders if the effects could have been lessened with quick communication. Certainly easy access to everyone eases the psychological effects of disaster. Parents around the globe can ease their anxious worrying with a simple phone call or email where the pony express would have had to suffice in years past.

While we can find things out fast, we can also find them out constantly. If I wake up at 3 am with a burning desire to know what’s going on in Belarus at this precise moment I can find out with just a few clicks of a button. But this also makes news pretty difficult to escape. As technology becomes more ingrained into society, it becomes more addictive. The constant onslaught of information can make it difficult to decide what is actually “news” and what is just filler.

When it comes to fear mongering, I think there are two different kinds at work, the sales-driven actions of the media, and the more sinister programs of the government. I am by no means a believer in the Big, Bad Government. I don’t buy conspiracy theories that the government is out to get us, nor do I think higher-ups spend all their time orchestrating evil schemes. But I do think programs like the terrorism warning charts are not entirely conceived with our best interests in mind.

The Bush Administration won support for many of its programs based on the assumption that we were under threat of attack. If most Americans didn’t believe terrorism was an imminent threat, it would have been a lot more difficult to justify policing the world and knuckling down on the “Axis of Evil.”

The fear mongering of the media is a very different case. Newspapers and channels are all pursuing the same thing: a profit. In the news media, the bigger the news is the bigger the audience (and the bigger the sales). If a political sex scandal or school shooting isn’t available, the easiest thing to do is take a piece of real news and blow it up. I think this is exactly the case with the swine flu.

Obviously it is a tragedy that people have lost their lives to this illness. And obviously since it is contagious it behooves us to exercise caution. But screaming doomsday predictions only incites fear and produces illogical responses, like the slaughtering of pigs in Egypt. Sure someone at the World Health Organization warned that the swine flu could reach “pandemic proportions”. But their job is to keep contagious illnesses like this under control so it makes sense they would be preparing for a worst-case scenario.

While I’m glad the people at the top are bracing themselves for impact, I don’t see any reason why the rest of us should be any more frightened than usual. Wash your hands, lead a healthy lifestyle, and cover your cough and you should be just fine. And spare that sneezing girl your dirty looks: she probably just has a cold.