Surviving the Swine Flu...

...Which by the way is no longer called swine flu in Mexico, it is now Human H1N1 Influenza.

It's  amazing how we get used to extreme situations. I don't remember such strange days since September 1985 when an earthquake brought down several buildings and killed thousands of people and leaving thousands more without a home.

And now we learn about these incidents very quickly: 9/11, the tsunamis in Thailand, flash floods in New Orleans... our world is shrinking and we are becoming McLuhan's global village (we now find out almost instantly about our neighbor's basement getting flooded).

Anyway, what really came to my attention during these days is how the media and communication systems, by trying to convey the seriousness and importance of the situation, injected fear and panic among people.

Two examples: one of my kids, who is just 6 years old, started having stress related stomach cramps (I couldn't help not to think about Charlie Brown sighing while clutching his belly and stating "my stomach hurts"). We approached him about this and he said he was very nervous because of the virus. His school made an excellent job of explaining it, but such an avalanche of information proved to be too much for him, even when we insisted there was nothing to worry about if we followed the safety instructions.

The second example is a dinner I attended to last week. While I did my best to continue life as normal as possible and worrying about the virus very little or not at all (I took precautions and got informed instead of getting worried) I suddenly realized people actually stopped their normal lives completely until last week.

I took my family out of the city when the crisis began because I was able to work from home, kept on working, playing with (and kissing and hugging) my kids, going to restaurants, the store, the video rental (yes, we still don't have an effective system such as Netflix down here and VOD doesn't have quite a great selection of titles)... yes, I wore a facemask some of the time when I got to public places (by my wife's advise), yes, I kept on washing my hands and using antibacterial gel, and yes, I kept on learning about the disease through newspapers, radio and TV.

What actually horrified me was the amount of stress this situation generated among the people, how misinformation damaged our international relationships and how people reacted during a "mild" crisis (if you take into consideration the amount of people infected, casualties and the seriousness of such a treatable disease against the size of the population, we were actually very fortunate to be in such a tragic mood).

I wrote in my facebook page and strongly believe that WE CANNOT LIVE IN FEAR. I REFUSE to live in fear. Yes, the situation was serious. Yes, we had to make people understand the disease and do something about it. The communication was adequate, as were the precautions taken. What I hated was watching people in panic and fear. Just imagine what would happen if a UFO landed on Earth... my god, people would throw themselves off bridges and cliffs. Some are like lemmings, I prefer to approach life in all its shapes with wonder and understanding, never with fear (after all, we ARE all going to die, let's make the best of the time we have here and use it productively, not dreading the monsters hidden under the bed or, in this case, in the handshakes and kisses of another person).

Just something to think about.

Have a happy week!