Old Deaths, Numbers

Old deaths don't terrify like the new ones, do they? Not to discredit the seriousness of Swine Flu, or any flu for that matter, but we need to calm down when the media ushers in the brand new way to die and put it in perspective with the more common, more likely to happen, old ways to die.

How easy it is to get worked up over an old disease, if the media dresses it up with a noun, in this case, an ugly noun, a noun that naturally puckers our lips when we speak it, as if we're sucking lemons: Swine. But we catch the old disease, the one that kills over 36,000 Americans each year, drink some OJ, watch some TV, miss a few days of work, and vomit now and again in a plastic bag-lined garbage can. So what. But we hear Swine Flu and our thoughts are racing. Oh my God, what is it? People are dying from it. Can I get it? What are the symptoms?

Science has taken out the terror from most of the old diseases. Plague, smallpox, polio, influenza all have lost a lot of our respect, despite nearly annihilating the entire human race several times throughout history. For almost two millenniums, we've had nothing to cure our fragile bodies, except leeches, insects, and the occasional crackpot idea that almost always led to certain death. The horror of these pestilences is tattooed to our DNA: "Ashes, ashes. We all fall down." We've never been an optimistic lot.

Today, however, even though 36,000 die a year from the old disease, we've convinced ourselves we're safe because we've got medicine. We've got Antibiotics. Take two a day for a week and call the doctor in the morning. What's scary about that? Not the numbers.

Four hundred thousand Americans die each year from smoking-related diseases and are replaced by new smokers. I can write 400,000 dead a hundred times, and still I won't quit smoking. I say it now, but it was years ago that I preferred its slow suicide, always felt the drug's completed work is years away, another lifetime I wasn't sure I wanted, as I was younger and didn't think too much on dying, didn't care too much for living, and knew enough of the old road I was taking, the road so many of my family traveled to its long, painful end. It brought familiar deaths, summed up with seemingly benign words, probably because they are as old as death itself: cancer, heart attack, stroke. How can these words scare me into quitting? I say that now. Smoking is a mistake, one that will probably do me in eventually. But I make mistakes all the time. I'm not sorry.

I'm with you. Any way I go through the numbers I can't see the faces. Alcohol kills approximately 100,000 . . . car accidents over 45,000 . . . on and on, these numbers. Day after day we die these old, familiar deaths with little protest. These are the deaths that terrify me. Am I numb because I don't cringe, no matter how grim the reporter's tone, no matter how many montages I see people wearing face masks, doctors checking blood and what now? It's not the same terror when the TV informs me the new flu has left 68 dead, especially when the casualties of a seemingly endless narco-war has claimed thousands and more. What's the right number that will make me worry? A thousand? A hundred thousand?

Because there's one thing I don't quite get in our recent history: where was our terror when hundreds died in the early eighties from AIDS, at that time just a nameless disease, a gay plague? Where did it go when young people kept dying and dying and dying while Reagan said nothing? Maybe I'm just looking at the numbers, but for us to be scared, does it have to be the right people dying, too? Does it have to take our mothers, daughters, and sons before we decide something must be done?

The greatest allies of pestilence are ignorance and indifference. AIDS has left a lot of our imaginations since the early nineties. It's now a disease that happens over there, in a world of malaria and cholera. It's not that we don't understand the mounting numbers of dead, they're just not the right numbers. They're not the numbers we care about.

As Camus illustrated beautifully in his novel, The Plague, the human imagination cannot fathom sheer numbers of death, unless you can make the immensity of it commonplace. Escort everyone from a crowded movie theater in a single line. One by one they are shot dead in the street. Move on to the next crowded theater and then to the next one and then the next one. Four thousand theaters of dead movie patrons = one year of smoking in America.

This was easy for Camus. He could not escape the numbers. No one in Europe 1940 could. They were dangling by the necks from trees, riddled with bullets in alleyways, dragged away into the night and buried in countless unmarked graves. All I had was a history book that reflected a few mostly tame black-and-white photographs of the war and this mind-boggling number, 50 to 70 million dead. I stared at that number. Tried to compute it. Fifty to 70 million living human beings, who were born, were loved and cared for by their mothers and/or fathers, caretakers, the state, some had brothers or sisters, some had lovers and friends, some had nothing, some had everything, and now all were entombed together in a number, a speculative number at that, in some poorly written history book for half-awake American students. Gone again, as the teacher instructs us to turn the page.

Pestilence or war. I'm convinced one of these or a combination of both ultimately will put an end to our blip of existence on this small, inconsequential, uncharacteristically green and blue planet. Yeah, we've read Frost's poem and are flipping a coin, heads: it's fire, tails: ice. Ice shelves the size of New York falling into the ocean. An asteroid spiraling from space, set on a course as old as the universe itself, all dressed up for its date with the Earth. If you gotta go, you gotta go.

I'm still hedging my bets on the old deaths, the ancient virus or our ancient wiring. The microscopic death that crawls inside our membrane walls to devour our cells, or the death spawned from an idea that passes the mind of a killer. Perhaps the idea's burrowed deep in the genetic makeup even before a person's born, a ticking bomb always there, a math equation that leads to zero. Just waiting, until it's brought to life by a few old, dependable chemicals, or a sharpened blade, a lit fuse, a smoking gun, an exploding star. If anything, history teaches us we're incredibly proficient at killing each other and equally skilled at watching others die.