The 8-year old I live with is in Cub Scouts. After his last scout meeting we got an email at home informing us of a positive flu test for one of his pack members. A few days later, here's the boy, sick, fevered, etc. Great. Break out the vitamins and rip open the Emergen-C and let the home remedy barrage begin in our desperate attempt to no get sick. Thanks Scouts. The boy weathered his flu well, and the vitamins, 7-Keto and Emergen-C seems to be keeping anything more than body aches away. Thanks to my mother and the Internet for all of this info about non-FDA-approved immune therapy boosting, along with the killer genes that have allowed me to live a wild and yet relatively healthy 41 years so far.
While I sit around being a stay at home unmarried, unemployed step-co-parent person, I have to say that the flu is not so bad. I wonder if Somer Thompson's neighborhood had a run-down appliance store with no regular hours of business that posts updated lists of convicted sex-offenders living in the neighborhood like we do. It's been a year living here, and the children (8-year old fraternal twins, a boy and a girl) can be both wonderful and terrible. I find myself with a whole new world of worries when it comes to them, as well as a whole new set of wonders. Of course, my mother often injects her vitamin laden advice. In the case of the kids though, her record on advice doesn't have the concrete results that they have had so far with the swine flu. She makes me paranoid as hell, with all of the worry about predators, and whether or not their father has the house bugged.
These things stall my work as a filmmaker. I wonder, often, how we can remember that, no matter what the news, the world we live in is a healthier, more peaceful place than ever before. It truly is, if you take a step back a moment. I wonder how I could ever hope to represent that. I then give up, because no one is interested in how good we have it, especially in the US. Here, as media consumers, all we want to know is who killed Somer Thompson and when are they coming for our children? Soupy Sales is dead, and when are we going to follow him? Desiree Jennings got a flu shot and now has to walk backwards.
Obsessed with death as a culture, that's what we are. So much so that we even idolize killers in the media (try two incredible shows, Dexter and Breaking Bad, both owing their success to our sympathy for two tragic, lying, murderers).
I could go on a rant about how ridiculous our society has become, but I'm not going to. The fact is, if you're reading this, I have constructed all of this out of the thin air of search terms as an experiment. What I say is true: keep track of the numbers before you get caught up in the fear. Cancer rates are falling. Child abduction is steady leftover that we have only noticed now because in the last 100 years we have learned to recognize a whole host of ways that children have been used and abused, and that abuse is on decline.
I'm quite satisfied with the way things are for me. It is unlikely that I will get dystonia like Desiree Jennings, or cancer, and I'm way too old to be abducted by anything but aliens. The truth is I believe very few people in the US have any cause to complain. After all, today, in the midst of "economic collapse," the H1N1 "epidemic," and the aftermath of yet another high-profile child killing, we are still watching Tv, Youtube, eating fast food, blogging, and generally living ridiculously well, while we console ourselves through the media about how hard and crappy everything is, and how even the funniest, most talented, most promising of us still fail and die.
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