There once was a boy who needed to fill programming gaps for his 24-hour cable news channel. The boy cried out, "There is a mad cow coming to your family's dinner table! Throw away your red meat!"
The villagers turned on his channel to hear his message. In a frenzy of panic they hurried to their refrigerators and with their 12-foot tongs, cast their meat into the darkest corners of the earth. So, tasteless tofu it was, as the nation trembled, afraid the disease would invade their homes.
But the Mad Cows never came, and the villagers (along with the U.S. beef industry) shook their fists at the boy and said, "Don't cry cow!"
Two years later, the boy once again needed to fill some airtime on his cable news station. "The bird flu is coming," the boy screamed. "Run for your lives!" With the famous phone booth scene from Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds playing in their heads, the villagers went into hiding, waiting for the End to come.
But the birds never came and the villagers shook their fists at the boy and said, "Don't cry bird!"
Four years later, the boy cried, "The swine flu is coming!" Now, dear reader, choose your own adventure!
The first option goes much like the story of the Mad Cows and the birds. The pigs never come, and the villagers shake their fists. The second option reads as follows: The villagers, already fooled twice by the boy, ignored his warnings. But this time the pigs did come, and all the villagers took the H1N1 bus to Duke Hospital.
The moral of this story: Each time the media portrays a potential health crisis as the coming of the End of Days, we take one step closer toward that end. Media hype-both of the next big plague and of the minor "hazards" that local news stations feel the need to warn us about each night ("Is your [insert common household product here] giving you cancer?!?")-desensitizes the public to health crises.
The final verdict on swine flu is not yet out. So far, the virus has spread rapidly, but it does not seem to pack more of a punch than the standard seasonal flu. However, whether swine flu turns out to be a second coming of the 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic that killed over 50 million people worldwide, or another instance of the many plagues that never were, how can we expect the public to react with an appropriate level of urgency when the phrase "public health crisis" is thrown around with reckless abandon?
Washington Post blogger Doug Feaver read through online comments for an article on swine flu and then wrote that only a minority of those who posted appeared concerned with the virus. Comments that downplayed the potential severity of the current pandemic were common. For instance, one woman declared, "Y2K all over again. The press is just blowing this out of proportion."
This "too-many-false-alarms-so-now-I-don't-care" phenomenon is not unique to health scares. Last year, Few Quadrangle had a few too many fire drills, false alarms and microwave popcorn-induced alarms. The students who actually left the dorm did so with exasperation and without urgency. Others preferred to brave the screeching noise and stay in their rooms rather than indulge the fire marshal. There is no doubt that had there actually been a large fire, those students would come to regret their decision to roll their eyes at the alarm rather than leave the building. Nevertheless, their actions indicate that the alarm has lost meaning in the same way that the old adage "run for the hills, the flu is coming" now falls on deaf ears.
Just as the Few Quad fire drills made the residents of the quad less safe, the annual health scares make us in a way more susceptible to the alleged threat. Perhaps we should just all take a hot shower (with anti-bacterial soap), a deep breath (through a surgical mask) and get back to what is truly important (Michael Jackson's death ruled a homicide!?.... I mean, wars and all that stuff).
Jordan Rice is a Trinity senior. His column runs every other Thursday.
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