I’m afraid of the Mexicans…
One thing that struck me at the hospital, by the way, listening to the news rolling in about the rapid advance of swine flu, is the issue of sheer, blind panic.
I remember at various times in my life when people blindly struck out at Those People as representatives of Some Other People that they were angry about. Those People looked like Some Other People, and they were nearby, so let’s rough Those People. Besides, they don’t have guns and aren’t dangerous, so it makes the process easier.
Otherwise, there’s the tried and true tactic of blind panic leading to the Lord Of The Flies Solution; we ran into it in the dark, it must be the beast, smash it.
For the former, I can see strikes at Mexicans, especially with big rallies around America over immigrant issues scheduled tomorrow in cities like Chicago. For the latter, judging from reports around the world of witless destruction of pigs (as if all pigs were instantly Carriers of The Big Disease) and pig farms by individuals and governments - I could see people attacking a factory pig farm out of anger and fear. Especially if swine flu ends up being a bigger killer than any other run of flu.
Today, a radio screed artist lost his job for his comments on Mexicans ‘importing disease‘, but considering some of the wild crap I’ve heard from nutcases over the last few years, I can’t imagine that it’s the end of the line on this sort of primitive fear stuff.
Should we investigate factory farms? Sure. Not a problem. But as Elizabeth Barrette, wise woman, was saying recently:
I’d be more interested in efforts to gain evidence and information than finger-pointing. That is, I’ll be happy to narrow my general condemnation of factory farming to a specific installation, and my general criticism of low resilience and sensibility in health care to WHO, if they can be firmly nailed as culprits contributing to this particular outbreak. But I don’t want to jump to conclusions; I want to jump to investigations.