The Lemming Pandemic

It’s amazing to me that many Americans have never seen a lemming given the regularity with which they behave like the little animal. Lest anyone not know, at certain times of the year, lemmings become affected by some strange compulsion to go over cliffs. If one lemming takes the dive, all the others follow. In human terms, it’s as Shakespeare’s Bardolph says: “In faith, I ran because I saw others run.” In lemming terms, it’s a lot of little carcasses heaped one upon another. In human terms, it is the latest panic—or should one say pandemic.

We all know that, for a variety of self-seeking reasons, the media adores creating a panic and then getting out in front to fan the flames. That’s what keeps readers/viewers/listeners coming back for more. The general pattern seems to be create some threat to personal lives, exaggerate the consequences, and then become the savior of humanity by holding the key to salvation. Of course, the media isn’t completely to blame. This system couldn’t work as well as it does if there weren’t people only to willing to succumb to the excitement. Some people are said to be in love with love. Well, there seem to be even more who are in love with panic.

Let’s be realistic. Every year influenza carries off 37,000 lives. This is plain, garden variety, unhyped flu. It picks off the young, the weak, and the elderly. So far, this year’s strain of flu has picked off a couple of hundred, the vast majority having a very unpleasant experience and then recovering. The only difference seems to be that young adults are affected. But is that enough for panic?

I caught the Asian Flu when it came round in the 1970s. That flu was hyped as the flu to end all flu’s. Sure it was nasty, but it never reached its hype. If I sound jaded, it’s becauseI’ve been there and done that. I’ll even go out on a limb and say this one won’t reach the exalted heights of pandemic either.

The fact is that pandemics just aren’t what they used to be. Giovanni Boccaccio wrote about a real one—the Black Death in Renaissance Florence. It began with a sneeze (which is why we say God Bless You when someone does) and rapidly led to skin boils and respiratory failure. No vaccines, no antibiotics, no respirators. If someone caught it, the doors and windows of their house were boarded up with everyone inside. Too bad if there wasn’t any food in the house. If they survived, they starved unless some brave family member smuggled them something to eat. Corpses were piled five or six high on carts and lugged off to mass burial pits. The only solution was to leave town and let the plague burn itself out. That’s what the characters in Bocaccio’s Decamerone have done.

Bocaccio described the different ways that the citizens of Florence responded to the very real threat of death. Some got drunk and lived hedonistically—they preferred to see death coming through the bottom of a bottle. Some tried to live moderately and avoid sick people as if virtue would protect them. Some intensified their prayers as if imperfect faith had visited the disease on the city. Others fled and potentially spread the plague to others. Self-preservation became the order of the day. Families abandoned members who showed signs of sickness, and medical help was non-existent if the fear of contagion, as was any use of law enforcement except to keep those infected locked away.

All we are asked to do is to keep ourselves indoors while yet another set of government contracts are issued to create a vaccine. And if we are sick, no one gets turned away from Emergency Rooms. The citizens of Renaissance Florence—who had real reason to be fearful--would undoubtedly consider us the wimps we are.