I remember that month very well: I was 21, home in Los Angeles from Columbia University and trying to figure out what to do with myself. (The following year I volunteered for the draft.) My family and I watched the news in horrified fascination, especially when a local TV news anchor told us all that Civil Defense advised everyone to have two weeks' supply of food at home.
Understand that this was an age when the air-raid sirens went off on the last Friday morning of every month, just to make sure they'd work when the Russians came over the pole to vaporize us. Åt least since the start of the Korean War, Americans had been endlessly warned about the prospect of nuclear war.
Now it looked as if it was really going to happen. The next day I walked up Poinsettia Place to the Ralphs supermarket on Sunset Boulevard to buy something, and came back to report that the place was jammed with people pushing two or three carts apiece, stocking up on whatever they could.
My stepmother then went up to Ralphs to get a solitary bag of birdseed for the backyard feeder, and found herself stared at by incredulous customers running up bills well over $100 (big money in 1962).
As bad as 9/11 was, the October Missile Crisis was far worse. We were dealing after all with a nuclear power, not a few fanatics with boxcutters. Over a decade of propaganda had established a narrative of catastrophe, and October 1962 looked like the inevitable climactic chapter.
My family agreed. In fact, we reasoned that the war was so likely that it was pointless to stock up on food we'd never live to eat.
As it turned out, the Russian ships turned away from the US blockade, and the crisis ended. On the TV news, we saw unhappy shoppers trying to return their stockpiled food and get their money back.
Anecdotal evidence is never enough to prove an argument, but the anecdotes of our own experience are pretty persuasive to us. So as I track the responses to H1N1, it seems to me we've learned little in the past 47 years.
People in Mexico City are engaged in panic buying just like Angelenos in '62. Whole US school districts are shutting down. Foreign tourists are avoiding Mexico like, um, the plague. Every pig in Egypt is being slaughtered for neither food nor hygiene.
As a retired educator, I'm embarrassed for my own profession. We have failed, as badly as our own teachers did in the Cold War, to teach critical thinking and logic.
It seems very likely to me, after following H5N1 for four years and H1N1 for eight days, that we could have an official pandemic declared in the next few days.
Big deal. It won't mean everyone dies, except for marauding motorcycle gangs and zombies shambling around in search of human flesh.
If you're over 50, you've already lived through two flu pandemics, those of 1957 and 1968, not to mention the ongoing pandemics of HIV/AIDS, malaria, and tuberculosis. With the exception of small, vulnerable communities, almost everyone survives a pandemic. As bad as 1918-19 was, it didn't end the Jazz Age or the Bolshevik Revolution.
If Dr. Chan moves us to phase 6 on Saturday, the sun will still come up again on Sunday. A few more people will contract H1N1 on Sunday, and a few will die. But life will continue.
Here's what really worries me: If we experience a pandemic as an anticlimax, like the swine flu of 1976, most people will sneer at the idea of pandemics in general. They'll see it as some kind of racket, a way to scare the dumb taxpayers into paying for expensive medical research into nonexistent problems. The politicians won't dare argue with that attitude.
So when the next real pandemic comes along, whether it's H5N1 or something else, it will kill millions of people needlessly, because the public-health resources won't be there to save them. And millions more will fall ill and die of routine diseases for the same reason.
So let us be very attentive to H1N1. It is already teaching us a lot, if only about our continuing ignorance of influenza. Let us stock up on a few days' worth of food and water, if only to let our governments and hospitals cope a little better with even a low-fatality pandemic. Let us familiarize ourselves with our local pandemic response plan.
But let's not kid ourselves that this is the end of the world.
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