I got the chicken-pox the summer after my seventh birthday. I remember the week of quarantine in my father’s air-conditioned apartment over the family store. It seemed an endless routine of scratching scabs and watching betamax movies (I saw Superman so many times, I could beat Christopher Reeve to all of his lines). But it was not a great catastrophe in my life because I was constantly reassured by my father’s nonchalance. And because it was chickenpox, for chrissakes. This was a normal part of growing up, a vital rite of passage shared by children the world over.
Two dozen flu seasons later, I often catch myself leaning cautiously away from a sneezing stranger. I do artful gymnastics on my morning metro commute to avoid contact with anyone, and my wife and I both lather on the Purell before and after touching the handrails. The only thing that keeps me from donning a respirator and a full-body suit is my fear of social rejection.
Every once in a while, someone steps on the metro wearing a face-mask, prompting nearly everyone else on the car to make brief eye-contact with each other. Because this is Washington, it’s hard not to think “what does this guy know that we don’t?” But, by and large, our eyes are all saying one thing: “Get a load of this guy. Who the hell does he think he is?”
The fear of communicable disease seems almost undemocratic. Certainly it is elitist. During the bubonic plague, the rich fled to the country to avoid contamination, while the huddled masses were left to share a painful death in the city.
But times have changed. As our population has grown larger and our social structure less stratified, pandemics have become equal-opportunity killers. The Spanish Flu, our last worldwide pandemic, touched nearly every family, rich and poor. Because it killed so many in the prime of their life, history only remembers the survivors. Franklin Roosevelt, Walt Disney and Georgia O’Keefe all beat the disease. 50-100 million others did not.
That the pandemic in our own times has not been virulent has given us all the confidence to forget this very real threat to public health. We reassure each other by our nonchalance, and we distract each other with less-elitist complaints like “Man, I just got KILLED in the October crash!”
When the flu season revisits us this fall, the CDC would do well to examine not only the vectors of Swine Flu, but also the ways that mass-psychology facilitates its communication. Just as they are creating incentives for pharmaceutical companies to make a vaccine more widely available, they should also set aside some serious money to make sure that we all take this disease seriously. We need something better than the obvious “cover your mouth” propaganda slapped together by the Government Printing Office. We need to know that it’s cool to stay home from work when we’re sick. We need to see that it’s admirable to wear a face-mask on the metro. And, who knows? Maybe we would all benefit from seeing a Brazilian Supermodel in a full-body suit.
Domestic Trends
:: Google paints a stark vision of the US economy.
Economic Analysis
:: Project Syndicate provides newspapers with analysis from the world’s top economists
Economic Calendar
:: The key events moving the market, highlighted by Briefing.com
Real Clear Markets
:: Daily briefing on the markets
Undervalued stocks
:: Stock screen based on “Warren Buffett and the Interpretation of Financial Statements”
Value Cruncher
:: A web tool that simplifies discounted cash flow analysis of public companies
Wikinvest
:: Simple research and portfolio consolidation.
Bubble-boy and the toxic masses
I got the chicken-pox the summer after my seventh birthday. I remember the week of quarantine in my father’s air-conditioned apartment over the family store. It seemed an endless routine of scratching scabs and watching betamax movies (I saw Superman so many times, I could beat Christopher Reeve to all of his lines). But it was not a great catastrophe in my life because I was constantly reassured by my father’s nonchalance. And because it was chickenpox, for chrissakes. This was a normal part of growing up, a vital rite of passage shared by children the world over.
Two dozen flu seasons later, I often catch myself leaning cautiously away from a sneezing stranger. I do artful gymnastics on my morning metro commute to avoid contact with anyone, and my wife and I both lather on the Purell before and after touching the handrails. The only thing that keeps me from donning a respirator and a full-body suit is my fear of social rejection.
Every once in a while, someone steps on the metro wearing a face-mask, prompting nearly everyone else on the car to make brief eye-contact with each other. Because this is Washington, it’s hard not to think “what does this guy know that we don’t?” But, by and large, our eyes are all saying one thing: “Get a load of this guy. Who the hell does he think he is?”
The fear of communicable disease seems almost undemocratic. Certainly it is elitist. During the bubonic plague, the rich fled to the country to avoid contamination, while the huddled masses were left to share a painful death in the city.
But times have changed. As our population has grown larger and our social structure less stratified, pandemics have become equal-opportunity killers. The Spanish Flu, our last worldwide pandemic, touched nearly every family, rich and poor. Because it killed so many in the prime of their life, history only remembers the survivors. Franklin Roosevelt, Walt Disney and Georgia O’Keefe all beat the disease. 50-100 million others did not.
That the pandemic in our own times has not been virulent has given us all the confidence to forget this very real threat to public health. We reassure each other by our nonchalance, and we distract each other with less-elitist complaints like “Man, I just got KILLED in the October crash!”
When the flu season revisits us this fall, the CDC would do well to examine not only the vectors of Swine Flu, but also the ways that mass-psychology facilitates its communication. Just as they are creating incentives for pharmaceutical companies to make a vaccine more widely available, they should also set aside some serious money to make sure that we all take this disease seriously. We need something better than the obvious “cover your mouth” propaganda slapped together by the Government Printing Office. We need to know that it’s cool to stay home from work when we’re sick. We need to see that it’s admirable to wear a face-mask on the metro. And, who knows? Maybe we would all benefit from seeing a Brazilian Supermodel in a full-body suit.