The Swine Flu: Why This Little Piggy Can't Make Me Cry

If you know me, you probably know that I am a hypochondriac. I think I have every disease known to man... all the time. I attribute this to my loving but neurotic grandmother, may she rest in peace, who habitually thought everyone around her was dying...all the time. If we had dirt on our hands, we immediately were plagued with some mystery illness that would surely kill us if we didn't go to the doctor within the next 24 hour period. As a pseudo neo-hippie, I believe in free love and enjoy being out in nature more than anything, but as i get older I notice it has become increasingly harder to do so without my grandmother's Brooklyn, New York, Jewish accent screaming, "ya gonna catch ya death; ya gonna need a tetanus shot!" The bottom line is that disease scares the living Hell out of me for no rational reason beyond the fact that dead or alive my grandmother has proven herself to be the archetypical Jewish mother.
And yet somehow, with the threat of Swine Flu all around, (the sheep wearing dentists masks, this persistent cough , and my frequent trips into the City), I just can't get myself to be worried about the Pig. I'll admit, I was sent into a momentary panic a week or so ago by an unusually high fever, but I awoke the next morning feeling like a new woman and haven't given it a second thought since. I'm just not worried about the swine flu. So naturally, this worries me. Why should a hypochondriac such as myself, who is finally faced with an actual disease, unconcerned with it? Call it a hunch, but I'm going to say that, for starters, it's called Swine Flu. All I see are images of the three little pigs or Pumba from The Lion King. Not very threatening. Now The Black Death, that's a keeper in terms of disease names. The Black Death does not sound like something you want to mess with. Neither does Scarlet Fever or Flesh Eating Bacteria. These are all things I would instinctually try and avoid based on the name. But Swine Flu sounds like a bored seventeen year old's senior prank, and quite frankly, in a time where I can't really count on finding a job when I get out of school or ever being able to retire, you tell me how much thought I should really be putting into how to avoid what sounds sort of like an overpriced, pork-based dish served at a fancy restaurant somewhere around Broadway. Bird Flu, Swine Flu, Mad Cow Disease. Doctors are getting lazy with their disease names, I'm getting bored with the over-exposure of them, and the rampant publication of Swine Flu fluff seems to be a blatant avoidance of the only real American issues, because let's face it, the amount of suicides resulting from job loss and economic failure probably trump any number of Swine-related fatalities. So I guess that's my answer; I'm not worried about Swine Flu because there are a lot of other things for me and my generation to be worried about. The wasted youth epidemic that is sweeping my generation of the nation is a lot more of a threat than a drop of pig snot could ever be. We were told to go to college, work hard then get a job. But we can't even though a lot of us actually want to. But the papers won't put that on the cover because it doesn't sell as well and it doesn't send people rushing to purchase over-priced and unnecessary medications. I’m not scared of the Swine Flu because I’m more scared of where this country is headed and what it means for my future. I’m not scared of the Swine Flu because if I get it and it’s as bad as they say it is, then hey, at least I won’t have to worry about paying off student loans or trying to save the endangered retirement fund.
That’s all folks.