la vie en rose

Cheesy joke alert:

One of my coworkers told me that he was visiting a friend recovering from a heart attack in the hospital. The man had previously told people that he would only do a certain thing (coworker couldn't remember what it was) when pigs could fly. His wife said, "Well honey, didn't you see the headlines? They say, 'Swine Flu.' "

Ha ha ha!

As a pregnant lady, I am not particularly concerned with this whole swine flu thing. I mean, 36,000 die each year from regular flu - it's just another reason to wash your hands, cover your sneezes, and stay away from sick people. All common sense.

What is not common sense, however, is the frothy panic that some people seem to be either working themselves up into or others up into.

Side note: In college, many of my history professors took umbrage with the idea that people should learn about history because those who are ignorant are doomed to repeat it. They would say that history does not repeat itself - the factors and circumstances are different in each event. The Iraq War is not another Vietnam, Obama is not another FDR, etc. They advocated learning history for the sake of the history itself, that it was worth knowing based on its own merits.

However, there are lessons to be learned from the past. It's impossible to disassociate current events from similar ones that have already taken place. It's in our nature to study and analyze and compare. Nothing happens in a vacuum - there will always be something that has already happened that we can say we either want to repeat or to never happen again.

So...when I hear conservative commentators saying things about permanently sealing our borders, that infected Mexican families are coming to America with the purpose of infecting us, or even suggesting that the terrorists planted the virus in Mexico in order to bring our population to its knees, I find it downright scary. This will boil down to be about racism, not about a virus. Never mind that it was brought to our country by American tourists. Facts will not stop people from calling for boycotts, for heavily patrolled border fences, for stopping people in the streets and making them prove that they are US citizens (like Sheriff Arpaio in Arizona is doing (What's next? Splitting up families? Oh yeah...).

The reason I brought up the history aspect is this - substitute "Jew" for "Mexican" in what these people are saying, and it sounds eerily similar to the calls from the Third Reich to limit Jews' rights before the Second World War. I'm not pretending that I have any answers for the immigration debate. I'm only saying that by purposely dehumanizing them to the point of calling them "aliens," that the tactics used by Hitler's minions don't seem too distant in the future. We just need to be careful not to let our fears of the unknown turn us into hate mongers.

Another side note: think of the hundreds of thousands of poor pigs that are being slaughtered because other countries erroneously assume that you can catch swine flu from swine! Such ignorance.