(S)wine and Di(n)e

Two people in BC have the swine flu, the hastily named disease that kills you dead in five days. I mention this because BC is a magnet for any outbreak of a new and rare disease. Previously, there’s been avian flu, S.A.R.S. and mad cow disease, all within 70 to 5 k.m. of where I am at any point. Several turkey and chicken farms in the Fraser Valley have had to be quarantined and the livestock culled because of avian flu. Considering how there’s over six billion people in the world the odds of a disease making it’s way from China or Mexico to one localized area numbering in the millions are small. Somehow, these disease bags are able to make that continent-spanning leap as fast as they can. No sooner will some pox emerge in a small village in rural China than it magically teleports to downtown Vancouver.
People cough on me all day, no matter where I go. Sometimes, their spittle, thick with lung butter, will leap from their mouths and enter my own. When they turn their heads and cough, they turn their heads in my direction. I will see people walk by with their children in strollers, and their children with have some form of terrible pox. In these situations, the townsfolk decide to take their diseased offspring out of school so they don’t infect the other children and instead take them to wherever they can find the most people in a crowded space, like shopping centres, sports arenas and airports.
If some life-obliterating disease eventually sweeps across the land, I’m fairly certain that it will make it’s first appearance in my backyard, and I don’t even have a backyard. I don’t even have a front yard, but still some hobbling, jilted freak is going to come uncomfortably close to me in a wide open space and proceed to spew out his infectious bodily fluids upon me in some vile manner, and that will be it for me. My town, my country, and my world are all conspiring to kill me.
I bet before it’s all over, a Rabbi will come out say, “That’s why God says, ‘Don’t eat pork.’” It will be the punch line to thousands of years of religion.
As for Mexico: you can’t drink the water, thousands of people are brutally murdered in drug wars every years, the air is virtually unbreatheable, you’re Catholic and now your pigs are killing you with their flu virus. Who did you piss off? I bet their name was long and unpronounceable, and some fat white tourist is taking a picture on top of his statue’s head right now.