American Viral Idol
I've been thinking today about the delicacy of life.
Having been felled quickly only last week by something, knocked flat on my ass, told not to eat or drink or move, by some little virus or bacteria, one is reminded of what a frail dance this is.
Then this flu comes along (and ominously on the same day a fresh case of the plague here locally), and it's like nature saying: Yeah, uh, I'm not done reminding you yet of what a frail dance this is, you hear?
They don't call her mother nature for nothing. You say, "Yes Ma'am" when she speaks.
I was surprised today to hear that there's panic out there, on twitter, perhaps in the local news, because thankfully I am not hearing it directly myself. I'm blessed right now I guess because I'm not really attuned to any of these streams of panic.
The one ripe vein I explored was the comments sections of on line news articles. And there is such a bizarre middle-school level response going on in some of these spots. What I'm witnessing, as opposed to this panic, is a knee-jerk opposition to the very idea that the medical community's concern being valid. It's merely the flu.
The 1918 variant wasn't just brand sparkling new as if it came off the face of one of Jupiter's moons one day. It was a recombination of earlier viral lifeforms, strands of this, strands of that, a delicate remixing of this life/non-life form. A frail dance, this unique replicating being that is both life and non-life at once, life and death, inflicting this random, toggling judgment upon the lifeforms it would come to inhabit, be it bird, swine, human, or horse. And when two concomitant illnesses come together, by happenstance of history, by some shifting of the lifesoup winds, bam. All of humanity is like WTF? just like that.
I can't help but be shaped right now by my own experiences, and put simply, I lost most of my closest friends and a total of 50 friends all together mostly in three years to AIDS. I lost other friends during this time to drugs, violence, suicide... It was the Reagan years, after all. Mourning in America. But watching people just be cut down right around you is something you don't forget.
After all my friends were gone, I spent the last few years of my AIDS activism life trying to convince people that there was a coming upsurge in minority communities which would particularly adversely affect women. This was a few years of being told flat-out that I'm being alarmist. It's a gay disease. Not less than five years after I gave up the numbers shot up among black women. The predictions came true.
So on Friday morning when I realized that this flu outbreak in North America happened to have check marks next to a high number of indicators of the types of flu that turn out to be major killers (especially the inverse death rates, killing young people in their prime more than the traditional older people and infants), I was humble before nature. I want to listen. I want to hear what nature is saying just at the moment. And the folk who have their stethoscopes pressed up hardest against Mother Nature's soul right now are the doctors and the lab scientists at WHO, the CDC, and in that bizarre laboratory on the television show "Fringe."
And they are watchful.
I am also gratefully not attuned to any "end of the world" thinking, celebrating or welcoming the end of the world. The 1918 flu obviously wasn't the end of the world because we're all still here to twitter about cutting our toenails. The Black Death didn't kill all our ancestors.
The closest thing to the end of the world, though, that I can think of (and I'm sure there are more) was the biological assault on the indigenous people of this continent. Some estimates are that 95% of the population of the Americas was decimated by the "old world" diseases brought on by the early explorers, primarily European. The population had been separated so long from the rest of the world, they had absolutely no immunity, and many worlds ended in just a few years.
Now we're all a day away from each other. The viruses have the potential to outpace the antivirals and other supplies we may need to ship around to combat them. Faster than Federal Express even.
Since the WHO doctors don't yet know, and perhaps even Dr. Who is presently stumped, and since this particular flu phenomenon has only just begun (to the tune of Carpenters songs), we don't know what it will do.
Here in LA I haven't seen any signs of panic, although I'll admit I'm not watching television at all these past few days. I've seen mothers educate their sons about why this flu may be different, combating the "just the flu" response that can decrease the likelihood of people following the precautions.
One mother mentioned today at work that her sons were listening to her more about washing hands, etc., because of twitter, the news, and the LA Times, so my impression has not been one of panic, rather an orderly realignment of the thinking about a simple disease, a reminder of how it has surprised us numerous times in the past. That's it's job. It's a virus. It has to keep us on our toes, toggling back and forth between it's life judgment, and it's non-life judgment.
That's it. H1N1 is Simon Cowell.
Having been felled quickly only last week by something, knocked flat on my ass, told not to eat or drink or move, by some little virus or bacteria, one is reminded of what a frail dance this is.
Then this flu comes along (and ominously on the same day a fresh case of the plague here locally), and it's like nature saying: Yeah, uh, I'm not done reminding you yet of what a frail dance this is, you hear?
They don't call her mother nature for nothing. You say, "Yes Ma'am" when she speaks.
I was surprised today to hear that there's panic out there, on twitter, perhaps in the local news, because thankfully I am not hearing it directly myself. I'm blessed right now I guess because I'm not really attuned to any of these streams of panic.
The one ripe vein I explored was the comments sections of on line news articles. And there is such a bizarre middle-school level response going on in some of these spots. What I'm witnessing, as opposed to this panic, is a knee-jerk opposition to the very idea that the medical community's concern being valid. It's merely the flu.
The 1918 variant wasn't just brand sparkling new as if it came off the face of one of Jupiter's moons one day. It was a recombination of earlier viral lifeforms, strands of this, strands of that, a delicate remixing of this life/non-life form. A frail dance, this unique replicating being that is both life and non-life at once, life and death, inflicting this random, toggling judgment upon the lifeforms it would come to inhabit, be it bird, swine, human, or horse. And when two concomitant illnesses come together, by happenstance of history, by some shifting of the lifesoup winds, bam. All of humanity is like WTF? just like that.
I can't help but be shaped right now by my own experiences, and put simply, I lost most of my closest friends and a total of 50 friends all together mostly in three years to AIDS. I lost other friends during this time to drugs, violence, suicide... It was the Reagan years, after all. Mourning in America. But watching people just be cut down right around you is something you don't forget.
After all my friends were gone, I spent the last few years of my AIDS activism life trying to convince people that there was a coming upsurge in minority communities which would particularly adversely affect women. This was a few years of being told flat-out that I'm being alarmist. It's a gay disease. Not less than five years after I gave up the numbers shot up among black women. The predictions came true.
So on Friday morning when I realized that this flu outbreak in North America happened to have check marks next to a high number of indicators of the types of flu that turn out to be major killers (especially the inverse death rates, killing young people in their prime more than the traditional older people and infants), I was humble before nature. I want to listen. I want to hear what nature is saying just at the moment. And the folk who have their stethoscopes pressed up hardest against Mother Nature's soul right now are the doctors and the lab scientists at WHO, the CDC, and in that bizarre laboratory on the television show "Fringe."
And they are watchful.
I am also gratefully not attuned to any "end of the world" thinking, celebrating or welcoming the end of the world. The 1918 flu obviously wasn't the end of the world because we're all still here to twitter about cutting our toenails. The Black Death didn't kill all our ancestors.
The closest thing to the end of the world, though, that I can think of (and I'm sure there are more) was the biological assault on the indigenous people of this continent. Some estimates are that 95% of the population of the Americas was decimated by the "old world" diseases brought on by the early explorers, primarily European. The population had been separated so long from the rest of the world, they had absolutely no immunity, and many worlds ended in just a few years.
Now we're all a day away from each other. The viruses have the potential to outpace the antivirals and other supplies we may need to ship around to combat them. Faster than Federal Express even.
Since the WHO doctors don't yet know, and perhaps even Dr. Who is presently stumped, and since this particular flu phenomenon has only just begun (to the tune of Carpenters songs), we don't know what it will do.
Here in LA I haven't seen any signs of panic, although I'll admit I'm not watching television at all these past few days. I've seen mothers educate their sons about why this flu may be different, combating the "just the flu" response that can decrease the likelihood of people following the precautions.
One mother mentioned today at work that her sons were listening to her more about washing hands, etc., because of twitter, the news, and the LA Times, so my impression has not been one of panic, rather an orderly realignment of the thinking about a simple disease, a reminder of how it has surprised us numerous times in the past. That's it's job. It's a virus. It has to keep us on our toes, toggling back and forth between it's life judgment, and it's non-life judgment.
That's it. H1N1 is Simon Cowell.