Much like our approach to a spreading disease, we attack the problem head on. We identify and control, expose and explain the problem. We put it on an observational pedestal and extract the most we can.

Swine Flu’s potency is waning. People are arming themselves in new ways and developing progressive ways to detect such anomalies. But the antagonist remains. It still exists in our day-to-day.

Being a victim of swine flu is voluntary. We choose our experiences and encounters, choose whether or not to expose ourselves to the possibilities of being infected.

Listen to the warnings, respect the experts and ignore the radicals- if you are stupid about it there will be an infection.

Be careful of the antidotes you buy. While they may be a temporary solution- it is simply a band-aid on a broken leg. Avoidance is the only true form of protection, while it may mean breaking habits and ingrained notions, choose the make the smart decision at remove yourself from questionable zones.

It’s gone beyond sensible.
I wake up at night grinding my teeth because something happened hundreds or thousands of miles away from me, and some woman with bleached teeth and booming timpani drum intro music decided I needed to know about it.

And instead of telling me in a calm, collected manner like the fine chaps on BBC, she frantically, eyes wide and eyebrows plucked, described it in every gory detail.

I subject myself to this willingly.  I choose to learn about things that happen far, far away, things that have no immediate consequences.  I read the articles, the banners, the tickers, the headlines, the blogposts, the captions, the op-eds.  I watch the newsbreaks, the embeds, the slowmo, the pundits, the talking heads, the big glass maps that can be stretched and zoomed and made red and blue and topographical.

I sometimes wish I was stronger.  I imagine a life where I only know what I see and hear from walking around my neighborhood.  Look, there’s a new pet store going up on Hanover.  Oh that’s too bad, the anti-abortion crazies are out again.

But I can’t.  I sit and think “maybe I should buy a gun” as the price of pork drops and kids get days off from school and the regular flu, the one we’ve all had, kills thousands more than its porcine cousin.

I wasn’t so sure what it was, so I asked some people:

What is swine flu?

Here are the responses:

Health official: Swine flu is a potential threat to the well being of humanity. Please use extreme caution.

Fox News: Swine flu is a potential threat to the well being of humanity. Please use extreme caution. Obama is responsible.

CNN: Swine flu is a potential threat to the well being of humanity. Please use extreme caution. Obama will save us.

Local News: There was a possible swine flu case at a local day care early this afternoon. Later, it was confirmed that the child had simply shit her pants.

Obama: It is a priority of the United States of America.

The President of Mexico: Obama!

My dad: It’s sounds kinda fucked up. Make sure you wash your hands.

A homeless man: Man, I had Swine Flu when I was twelve. My mom still made me go to school. Pussies.

A random 11-year-old I overheard on the bus: It’s like strepthroat, except it feels like there is a pig inside of you. You get it from eating too much bacon.

Kindergarten teacher: It’s when a really big piggy gets a really big coughy and then entire human race goes extincty.

Two drunk guys in a bar:

Guy 1 – It’s like SARS mixed with the bird flu and then injected into a pig.  Guy 2 – Oh ok, now I understand.

Screenwriter explaining it to a producer in an elevator: It’s like Babe meets Outbreak.

Wikipedia: Swine Flu was the back-up drummer for Duran Duran in the late 1980s. It was the author of the novel Great Expectations, and is the only other person, besides Whoopi Goldberg and Jesus, to enter the world via virgin birth.

The future: It’s small potatoes.

Along side this evolution of the flu we’ve also seen an evolution in other aspects of society.  We saw colas evolve to include only 1 calorie.  We saw Tyler Perry evolve from a no-name writer to someone the entire country can hate equally. We saw yogurt evolve into a pouch you can take on the go.  We saw the internet evolve beyond just a series of tubes.  We saw Dominos evolve into a place where no one actually wants to eat anymore.  But more importantly, and relevant to this title piece, we saw the news media evolve into a friend that no one likes because they are always gossiping about things they don’t know about and freaking you out over nothing but you still hang out with for reasons far beyond you. And breathe.

OK so the point of that tangent, however mixed up it may be, is that the news has gotten crazy good at freaking people out.  Now in most cases it’s over stupid shit like “Studies show a resurgence in scurvy.” People will chat about it at the water cooler, maybe drink a glass of orange juice, and leave it at that.  But  every once in a while the media knocks it out of the park with an idea that spreads like lice in grammar school and totally scares the entire world.  Swine Flu is one of those cases.  The question is, are they doing us a favor or are they giving us a metaphorical oil check if ya catch my drift?

Here is a hypothetical that I’ve been working out and I’m pretty sure we can blame it all on Sanjay Gupta because what kind of name is that anyway?  Plus he is so devilishly good looking. Here goes:

CNN caused mass hysteria by reporting the threat of an impending Swine Flu pandemic essentially 24 hours a day for weeks at a time.  Everyone in the country heard about this with the exception of Perez Hilton because he had a dicks in his ears.  Once they found out that the Swine Flu was spreading they became extremely fearful of contact with other humans and began spending all non working hours at home.  This lack of exposure to other women meant that men were actually finding their wives attractive again and began propositioning them for “Adult Time.”  Now because the men had been staying at home they had to do stuff around the house like take out the garbage and clean the gutters and stuff.  Women totally get turned on by house work so they were willing to put up with their husbands getting all sweaty up on them.  This re-ignited a passionate cycle of cleaning and love making that this country hadn’t seen since the introduction of the pine-sol lady.

It’s been almost three weeks now since the Swine Flu hysteria began, and that means there has been a lot of love making going down.  Love making we can thank CNN for.  That said, to date there have only been a couple hundred deaths from Swine Flu based on my Google searches, but I am willing to bet a lot of money that there will be a spike in the birth rate happening around late January. 9 months after the Swine Flu.

CNN averted what could have been a terrible pandemic by scaring the living shit out of the entire world, but they wouldn’t stop there.  They got the entire country having sex on freshly moped floors and actually created a potential increase in population because of the Swine Flu….  CNN may have cause the next baby boom!  That my friends is why Swine Flu is for lovers.

Follow Swine Flu on Twitter for realzies here

Maybe I’m the opposite of a hypochondriac. Maybe I’m paranoid. Or maybe I’m just an idiot.

But I think the swine flu is a load of shit.

And by “load of shit” I mean, “government experiment.”

What experiment they’re conducting I’m not sure. But I’m pretty sure it has something to do with modern human beings’ apathy towards national news media. When you mix this with the aim of getting the public’s attention off the shitty economy for a hot second, it seems almost plausible.

The reason I think this Swine Flu Epidemic is interesting is because it seems to me that people just don’t care. In the past 5 days I visited two of the places where there were supposed “outbreaks”— The University of Delaware in Newark, DE, and New York City. As far as I saw, people in neither place didn’t seem bothered by the flu whatsoever, let alone even know there was an outbreak. The entire time I was there, I saw one mask. I asked my friends in New York if they were worried about catching anything. One of them said “No,” told me I was sitting on his Wii controller, and asked me to kill myself. Good guy.

The point is, people just do not care. And the answer why is desensitization.

Think of the how the news media over-saturates us with stories, thrusting them in our faces despite the fact we were all desensitized long ago—the culmination of too much information, too much TV, too much internet, massed together in a giant ball of lethargy.

While I realize the idea of a government experiment is a highly ridiculous and downright absurd claim to make, it may be something to think about.

At the least, it would make an interesting plot to a movie someday.

Write that one down. That’s a freebie.