On the Road Again - Post 3

Today featured a leisurely drive from southern Utah to Montpelier, Idaho, and a world-class BLT.

I feel silly waxing rhapsodic about a sandwich within 24 hours after extolling the geologic splendor of Bryce Canyon, but there you have it.

The Roadfood people note in their rave review of Hire's Big H in Salt Lake City that the BLT is "an unassuming masterpiece." "Deceptively simple" would be a better descriptor than "unassuming," but the sandwich is indeed a masterpiece.

To clarify - and for the benefit of any chefs who decide to embark on the assembly of a truly great bacon, lettuce and tomato sandwich - here are the essential elements:

--First and foremost, the bacon must be cooked to order and only slightly cooled. None of that bendy, glutinous, after-the-fact garbage; the BLT can only reach perfection when the bacon is freshly cooked, crisp and still warm.

--The tomatoes must be ripe, red, cold and sliced about the width of a pinkie finger.

--The lettuce may be leafed (my preference) or torn into bite-sized pieces, but it must be fresh, crisp and cold.

--The mayonnaise must be the real deal - smooth, creamy and white. Nothing ecru or goopy or filled with chemicals. There must be enough for a teardrop or two to squeeze out while you eat, but not so much that the sandwich sobs.

--Finally, and nearly as important as the bacon, is the bread. Nothing multigrain or sourdough or crusty or fancy in any way. The bread must be white bread, but not, I hasten to add, some soft doughy tasteless abomination. It should be white bread like someone's grandmother from the old country makes - substantial and full of natural flavor - and it should be toasted to a lovely nut brown on both sides. Oh, and there should be only 2 slices of it, both slightly thicker than the tomato slices. This is not some starchy monstrosity we're building; it's an exquisite assembly that someone will still be marveling over hours, possibly days, later.

I think I can tear myself away from blissful contemplation of the BLT long enough to describe the beauties of the drive north. Salt Lake City is always a bit of a production to get out of, what with the traffic and the road construction, but we left before serious rush hour began, so it didn't take us too long to find ourselves in the gorgeous green serenity of northern Utah and southeastern Idaho.

This topography is one of rolling hills, except here the hills rise 2500 feet or more from the roadway, which is itself around 6000 feet above sea level. The air is fresh, pure and semi-arid (no humidity and no frizzing of curly hair). The temperature is in the 70s. The mountains are the gentle, angle-of-repose slopes carved by receding glaciers; with their rounded fissures and cracks, they always look to me like the gigantic paws of colossal animals at rest.

The whole landscape, in fact, looks like the purview of titans. The scale is vast. No crowding escarpments here. The mountains hang back, like quietly self-confident hosts who know they need not assert themselves to be noticed.

These mountains are densely blanketed in green, from scrub to shrubs to small rounded trees to sentinel-straight ranks of evergreens. It's amazing how many shades of green there are. A few white or yellow wildflowers and some purple shrubs also stud the carpeted slopes, but the overall effect is of a thousand shades of green, from sage to lime to loden and everything in between.

Just before Utah gives over to Idaho, the road opens onto the breathtaking vista of Bear Lake. Its vast acres of cobalt blue water fringed by dark-green-cloaked mountains are impossible to capture photographically (at least by me), but it leaves a mental imprint that cannot be forgotten.

About 30 miles later, we're in Montpelier. There's nothing much there, but after last year's Death March to Bataan drive from Salt Lake City to Yellowstone, we decided to take it easy on this trip. Our destination is the Grand Tetons (missed last year due to said Death March), but tomorrow is soon enough to get there.

I'm a snob where big city hotels are concerned, but on the road I require nothing more in a place to stay than cleanliness, blackout shades, air conditioning, and the delivery by both the bed and the shower of firm pressure. The Clover Creek Inn offers all this, plus the added luxuries of friendly staff, high-speed internet access, a profusion of pillows, and towels a step above typical motel fare. We reconnect briefly with the outside world, then sleep like babies.

One last thing: It seems important to mention that we ate no potatoes in Idaho, a mistake we intend to rectify the next time through.

On the Road Again - Post 2

One of the reasons I love Utah's National Parks is that they are literally groundswells of geology in action. I have no interest in flora and very little interest in fauna, but I have a passion for geology. I love its all-but-infinite time horizons, its grandiosely broad perspective, its eloquence and its ubiquity.

The geologic story of Bryce Canyon - and of Utah's other National Parks - is primarily a story of water. Rock formations result from erosion, and erosion, even in the desert, is water's handiwork. The day-to-day freeze-thaw cycle of dew, rain, ice and snow sculpts rock by working its expansion-contraction magic over geologic time.

About 60 million years ago, the basin that covered most of southern Utah began to fill with fresh water. For millions of years, rivers and streams from surrounding mountains filled the lake in the basin with silts, clays and sands. Calcium carbonate glued these sediments together and formed the limestone from which Bryce Canyon was carved.

About 16 million years ago, southern Utah began to rise as large faults in the earth's crust pushed up a series of plateaus. The Paunsaugunt Plateau rose from sea level to approximately 8000 feet. The Aquarius Plateau, just to the east, rose 2000 feet higher still. Water erosion began to wear away the limestone even as the plateaus were still rising. Eventually, the softer stone washed away, leaving the spires, arches, walls and, finally, the hoodoos of Bryce Canyon.

Hoodoos are the pinnacles left behind when ridges, walls and arches wear away and collapse. They go last because they're protected by a layer of harder caprock called dolomite. This erodes too, but at a much slower rate. The differential erosion rates are what cause the crazy shapes. Dolomite can't protect the hoodoos forever, though; they, too, eventually collapse.

One of the coolest things about rock formations like Bruce Canyon is their ephemerality. They seem, and indeed are, permanent when viewed in human terms. But in geologic terms, they are provisional, fleeting, as mortal as we are. Geology has all the time in the world and, given all that time, the same forces that created Bryce Canyon will reduce it to rubble and then replace it with something equally spectacular - again and again and again.

With that said, I'll let profound beauty speak for itself:

On the Road Again - Post 1

The desert in summer has a beauty, but it is a subtle beauty. Part of its appeal is its essential featurelessness. But for the occasional sprinklings of Joshua trees and other close-to-the-ground dun-colored scrub, the desert is nothing but sand, the many-colored but utterly barren mountain ridges that ring the horizon in every direction, sky of a singularly deep blue, and the hot, clear, brilliant sun. The vistas are huge and panoramic; they don't merely dwarf their constituent parts, they swallow them up. Las Vegas, which admittedly has fantastical elements that would make it unlikely in any setting, seems altogether chimerical within two minutes after it disappears from the rearview mirror.

Between Las Vegas and the northeast Nevada-Arizona border (pat yourself on the back if you knew that a corner of Arizona pokes up between Nevada and Utah), there is almost nothing but limitless desert. But for the road, it's probably looked the same for hundreds of thousands, maybe millions, of years. Well, the road and Mesquite, Nevada, a tacky, hopeful Las Vegas wanna-be. In the summer as it shimmers in the heat, Mesquite seems particularly well named - it looks to be possible to grill a steak on virtually every rooftop, roadway and other sun-scorched surface.

The little spit of Arizona changes everything. Suddenly, the road winds and climbs and the mountains close in. The sun is just as intense, the mountains just as orange and craggy, but the perspective is now primarily vertical rather than horizontal. It is a fitting introduction to Utah, one of the most extravagantly beautiful places on earth.

The diversity of Utah's topography is astonishing; it offers everything from arid desert to dense alpine forests to verdant pastures thousands of feet in the air to fantasy lands of iron-rich sandstone and pearly limestone. Its five national parks - more, I believe, than in any other state - span a tiny band right at the top of the quality spectrum, from the eye-popping splendor of Zion and Arches to the out-of-this-world glory of Capitol Reef, Bryce Canyon and Canyonlands.

Interstate 15, which starts in Los Angeles and goes north, by way of Las Vegas and Salt Lake City, all the way to the Canadian border, was well placed. It occupies the only ugly and boring cylinder of space in Utah. We leave it behind at the first opportunity and wend our way to Bryce Canyon via one of the many scenic byways available to people not in a hurry.

Within the next hundred miles, we gain nearly 8000 feet of elevation and lose just over 40 degrees of temperature. Not too far after the summit at 9910 feet above sea level, Lake Navajo, in the picture above, perches placidly in the rich, dry 71-degree air.

Within 50 miles of Lake Navajo, we encounter the hoodoo-topped red rocks in the pictures below. This topographical diversity is all part of the Dixie National Forest, so named not out of geographical confusion, but because Mormons in the late 1800s sent some of their number to this part of southern Utah to grow cotton.


Our home for the night is Bryce Canyon Lodge, a historical landmark inside the park that was built by the Union Pacific Railroad early in the 20th century. We wander, somewhat breathlessly inasmuch as we are now at a lung-draining 8500 feet, surrounded by 6-million year old rock formations. The pink cliffs of the Wasatch formation date back to the Cenozoic Era, the time when mammals first appeared on earth.

More on all that tomorrow. For tonight, content after a dinner of salad and grilled red trout, we walk to the lip of the canyon and watch the sun set behind the alternating soft siltstone and hard limestone layers that millions of years of rain, ice and snow have eroded into fantastical pinnacles, walls, and arches. It is strange to think that sunsets were already old-hat billions of years before these ancient rocks existed.

Youth

I am at the coffee shop, having been driven out of my normally quiet home by the clatter and bustle of the cleaning people. In four high-backed upholstered chairs that don't match and have, in any event, seen much better days, sit four teenagers. They have the chairs pulled close around a tiny table - one of those short side tables that serve as central tables in coffee shops.

The little table above which the teenagers' chairs loom is crammed with food and drink, and the teenagers are gobbling. This is surprising. I doubt the three boys and one girl combined weigh 400 pounds. They are, all of them, freakishly skinny, drug addict skinny.

Their clothes and haircuts seem to have been chosen for maximum ugliness. Underwear is visible on all - the boys are sporting colorful tight briefs (the kind little children wear) with either jeans or slimy nylon basketball shorts slung on their palm-width hips, defying gravity; a ramshackle bra, which she does not need, pokes out of the girl's skimpy sundress, itself a plaid the colors of jaundice and fresh bruises. Two of the teenagers are dirty blond, two are dirty brunette; all of their hair is pasted greasily to their skulls and none of it appears to have been cut with any sort of plan or symmetry in mind. One of the blond boys wears a red woolen stocking cap. (This is Las Vegas and it is currently 104 degrees Fahrenheit).

The teenagers' skin keeps the drug addict imagery alive: they have no glow, no tan, no ruddiness, not even the slick shine of acne. They are gray. But for their oddly loud clothing, they could be characters in a black and white movie shot by a bad cinematographer.

How do I see all this? They cannot sit still as they gobble. First one, then another, then the first, then yet another pops up, wanders around the shop, texts, makes a quick call, sits back down. Perhaps all this fidgeting is why their food creates no bulk. Standing, the boys look like long-waisted optical illusions. Their legs are skin-wrapped sticks, seemingly nowhere near sturdy enough to support even emaciated bodies. One of the boys slings his arm around the girl. She smiles, but does not look up at him. Both the line of her jaw and the knobs where her arms meet her shoulders look sharp enough to cut glass.

It is impossible to think of any of them writing a term paper, running for public office, raising children, curing cancer, working in an office building (or, for that matter, in the Peace Corps) or in any other way assuming the mantle of adulthood.

There is no denying it: I am old. What a relief. I am giddy with the realization that my own transition from awkward awful adolescence to adulthood is so far in the past as to be all but beyond recollection.

A Howl at the Moon

How I wish it were possible to meet other people's behavior in kind without having to think of oneself as equally churlish. It irritates me to feel obliged to take the high road, even though I know it's the right thing to do, and the only realistic option, when others are ignorant, unresponsive, unreliable, rude, ungenerous, thoughtless or so wedded to their own agendas that the mere hint of a differing viewpoint pushes them to dizzying heights of defensive anger and uncivilized restatement or to awkward depths of sulky withdrawal.

I would give a lot never again to have to deal with people who, as William James put it, think they are thinking when all they are really doing is rearranging their prejudices. I'm tired of "you scratch my back; I'll refuse to acknowledge you even have a back" behavior. I'm weary beyond belief of people unwilling or unable to keep their promises, people who don't follow up, people who ask and take but don't listen or give, and people who don't mean what they say (or maybe they do, but it doesn't matter because what they say has no apparent influence over what they do).

When did breathtaking inconsiderateness become something basically decent people allowed themselves to indulge in with nary a blush or pang? Get back in touch with me after a decade to request a personal reference, but via a note that makes it plain that you didn't even bother to look at my profile on the LinkedIn/Plaxo/Biznik/Facebook/Twitter route you took to find me and so have no idea that I no longer live in Chicago or that I've written books or have a website. Request that I send you something, then fail to thank me for it or even acknowledge that you received it. Call me when you need something; live the rest of your life in blithe indifference to my existence. Ask me to be your friend, your fan, your follower, to vote for you in some contest, to comment on your blog, to read your book, to attend some event, all with no attempt or intent (or, as far as I can tell, even any awareness that it might be possible) to do the same for me. Yammer on about how relationships are important, engaging is important, generosity is important, then treat everyone else as if they are nothing but numbers who can boost you in some way.

I'd love to be able to make the decision to become a "me first, me only" jackass and still live with myself. The high road is often a lonely, windswept, howling place. I've learned from experience, though, that taking it exacts a lesser cost from me than does grubbing in the crowded mud of ill-mannered, uncharitable, self-absorbed ugliness. But oh how I sometimes wish it were otherwise!

Now Appearing on a Blog Near You

I've written another guest post, this one for M-BRANE SF, the creation of Christopher Fletcher. In addition to being a blogger, Christopher is a chef, a magazine publisher, and a fiction writer currently living "in self-imposed exile in OKC." My thanks to him for the opportunity and to GUD Magazine for introducing us on Twitter.

My guest post - "For Writers: A Story & Three Tactics" - is about my evolution as a writer of fiction, my writing process, and a few of the ways I polish my work. Please click through to read it. While you're on the M-BRANE SF site, be sure to take a look around; you'll find a lot of interesting material.

Lawyers & Their Careers

No one who knows or has worked with me would call me an apologist for large law firms. I have written, in some places scathingly, about the many, many things these firms could do better relative to their workforce, to their clients and to running themselves like sensible, for-profit businesses.

(If you're interested in reading any of my constructive criticisms, check out The Productive Culture Blueprint or browse the Careers and Feminism posts here.)

But when I met Ron Fox on Twitter and surprised him by saying that I thought large law firms, despite their many shortcomings, were still the best places for new law grads to learn the craft of being lawyers, I found myself limning the positives of what Ron calls "BigLaw" to explain what I meant.

Our ensuing email conversation was quite spirited, and Ron suggested we break it down into separate posts for publication on his Lawyer Satisfaction Blog.

Here they are:

Post #1 BIGLAW FOR NEW GRADS: FRIEND OR FOE?

Post #2 HOW DO LAW STUDENTS MAKE CAREER DECISIONS?

Post #3 ARE LAW SCHOOLS MERELY FUNNELS FOR BIGLAW?

Post #4 WHAT DO WOMEN WANT?

A Word is a Word is a Word. Or Not

Apparently, "balance" is now a dirty word. As in "Balance is a myth."

At first, I was inclined to dismiss this as so much sound and fury signifying nothing, but I can't seem to let go of it. The dirtying of the word seems to me to contribute to the repulsive notion that women are something other than full-fledged human beings with the ability and the right to manage their own lives - not to mention to focus on what actually matters.

I was informed this morning that in the context of work-life balance the word has come to mean 50/50, as in "I must spend the exact same amount of time and expend the exact same effort on my family as on my career in order to be balanced."

Obviously, this is ridiculous. A balanced life is just like a balanced story, a balanced diet, a balanced argument. The point of the word is that the thing in question works, it's pleasing, it has the right relative placement of the important and the less important. It does the trick. The 50/50 concept must be read into the word; it is not there as a matter of definition. Moreover, why 50/50? People have more than two things to balance; they have friends, lovers, hobbies, pets, causes and all manner of other activities in addition to career and family.

If the word has come to have this 50/50 connotation, the reason ties directly to the work-life balance conundrum faced by women. Whether adopted by women ourselves with the result that we feel bad about our own balance choices or batted at us at all times by a society intent on insinuating that it is not possible to have both a good career and a good family simultaneously, the whole "balance is a myth" phenomenon is misogynistic and limiting.

Does anyone hear the phrase "balance is a myth" and think first:

--Maybe I better reconsider taking a sabbatical to work on a political campaign?

--How am I ever going to incorporate care of my elderly parents into my life?

--Will it be possible to combine my career goals with being a dad?

I doubt it. I think most people hear the phrase and think either "Good grief! How am I ever going to make this career/being a mom thing work?" or "Women don't have what it takes to do both." The likely impact of this is concern bordering on despair for women contemplating taking on both, and narrowing of opportunities for women in work environments that demand dedication and commitment from their workers.

Neither impact helps women construct and lead full lives. The bottom line is that the dirtying of the word "balance" has a disproportionately negative impact on women and is inherently sexist.

Maybe I should just relax. One of the tried-and-true tactics for re-selling a tried-and-true concept is to make it seem fresh instead of old-hat. If we call balance a dirty word, we can spin a new one that, with any luck, will strike people as perky, appealing, and innovative. A bit sleazy perhaps, but OK. I can live with it.

Also, unintended meanings have been attaching themselves to words, like so many barnacles clinging to the hull of a boat, from time immemorial. The word "choice" comes immediately to mind. So does "working mother," which carries far more meaning than the usual adjective/noun combo. (It continues to annoy me no end that "working mother" is a loaded phrase and "working father" is not a phrase at all.) New nuances and meanings are how language evolves, and the evolution is not necessarily political. Evolution is OK with me, too.

But here's my problem. First of all, this wordplay is silly, in the same way the 60s talk about changing the word "history" to "herstory" was silly. Easily scorned silliness like this doesn't help the cause, both because it lends itself to being mocked and because it distracts our eyes from the ball. The word isn't what's in need of redefinition. Whether you call it balance or something else, the point is that each person has the right and the responsibility to define and then construct for herself a life that works.

Second, the world we live in does not need any help marginalizing women. It does not need any help insinuating that there's somehow a right way to be a woman and that all other choices fall short. Examples abound, be they discussions - in 2009! - of gender as a potentially negative issue when filling a Supreme Court seat, or the pregnancy of a 66-year-old woman (who is almost without exception referred to as a "career woman" instead of, more appropriately, as an example of selfishness and medical freakery), or a list of great 20th century books that manages to include only 7 books written by women (and to include among the exclusions, if you will, not only Edith Wharton and Flannery O'Connor and Alice Walker, but also the Great American Novel, Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird). (Don't like these examples, which, by the way, are all from just this morning? Here are plenty more.)

Even if the intent of throwing a nice word like "balance" under the bus is to empower women, the very separation of women from men in this regard suggests we are somehow not in the same position as men with respect to making our own choices, setting our own priorities, and doing what each of us, in her own wisdom and circumstances, deems the right things to do with her life. Backhanded sexism is still sexism.

Frontiers, Crossed and Crossing

My Twitter and Facebook friend Raul Ramos y Sanchez is the author of AMERICA LIBRE, a novel coming out this summer that is already an International Latino Book Award winner and one of USA Today's 2009 Summer Reads. Raul is thoughtful (in both senses of the word), and his passion for exploring issues of ethnicity in American life, culture and politics mirrors mine for exploring issues of gender. He is always posting provocative questions along these lines, and we have enjoyed stimulating conversations on Twitter, on Facebook, and here on my blog.

(In fact, Raul is the reason I now brave Facebook once or twice a week. The nicest thing I can say about Facebook is that I don't get it. The interface makes little sense to me, I have better ways to stay in touch with people I already know, and all those sophomoric quizzes and applications may well, it seems to me, put the final nails in the coffin of Western civilization (and, for all I know, Eastern civilization too). But Raul's thoughtful conversational prompts are great, and I can't stand the idea of missing one, so into Facebook's shallow, silty waters I now wade. I should also acknowledge, before I close the parentheses on this paragraph, that I recognize I'm standing in a glass house throwing stones when I diss Facebook. Twitter can certainly be sophomoric too, but I've found it much easier to tailor my own experience there. To each his or her own.)

Anyhoo, Raul asked today whether President Obama will name a Hispanic to the Supreme Court and whether achieving ethnic balance on the Court should even be a factor. I answered that it should indeed be a factor given our current circumstances, which are that there are eminently qualified Hispanic (and female) candidates for Justice Souter's seat. It is not necessary to relax standards to appoint a replacement who is not a white man. Given that, and in light of US demographics, I think achieving ethnic and gender balance on the Court is a completely appropriate goal.

In answering Raul's question, I lifted some ideas and paraphrased some sentences from A MERGER OF EQUALS. I concluded long ago, somewhat shakily, that quoting myself without attribution is not plagiarism. I feel...I don't know, derivative, I guess...whenever I do it, but I do it all the time anyway, secure in the knowledge that no one but I has read, let alone committed to memory, virtually every sentence I've ever written.

Today, however, my character Charlie keeps interrupting the writing I've been trying to do (on another book altogether) with a strong message to the effect that I didn't do justice to the point I lifted from him. So here it is (redacted to delete spoilers, for those of you who haven't yet read the book):

That created the first vacancy on the Executive Committee since the coup, and I felt strongly that we should fill it with a woman.

At the time of the coup, I had regretted that our slate didn’t include any women. But there were none of sufficient seniority at the Firm and we’d decided we had enough to manage without adding the effort of identifying and recruiting someone from outside, then selling her to the rest of the Firm. One step at a time, we’d told ourselves.

There was something about [recent events] that made me feel our “one step at a time” approach, however practical, had been essentially a rationalization. Women seemed to me to be able to handle just about anything, and it started to strike me as shabby that we hadn’t yet managed to handle getting even one into the Firm’s management.

The Firm still had no women positioned for appointment to the EC, although we had made good progress in the last year. I had no doubt that in another year or two several women would be good candidates for the EC.

We considered naming one of them to fill the EC vacancy even if it was premature. A couple were probably strong enough to make their voices heard even without a more established power base. But we weren’t looking to put a woman on the EC just so we could say we had one. The goal was to realize the actual benefits, financial and otherwise, of inclusivity and diversity – and to demonstrate that it wasn’t necessary to relax standards in order to include women.

Putting a token woman on the Committee satisfied neither of these goals. We needed someone with proven leadership skills and either a client base or some other equally credible value to bring to the Firm. All the EC members had strong client relationships; most were (or had once been) group heads and also chaired important Firm committees or held other administrative leadership positions. Naming a woman without these qualifications to the EC would undercut both the purpose behind our stated diversity goals and her ability to feel and act like a full-fledged member.

Because we’d have to look outside to fill the immediate vacancy with a woman, there was a fair amount of discussion at the EC about waiting for the next opening or seeking a woman for the open spot but filling it with the best candidate we found, irrespective of gender. As far as I was concerned, this was just so much bullshit designed to put off diversifying the Committee. I argued hotly that there was no reason we couldn’t find a qualified woman unless we failed to look seriously for one and that we shouldn’t settle for filling the vacancy with another man.

As I said to Raul, I applaud President Obama for taking into account the goal of achieving ethnic and gender balance and developing his Supreme Court candidate list accordingly. As Charlie reminded me, there is no reason we can't find a qualified and diverse candidate unless we fail to look seriously for one.

Hysteria

I don't understand the impulse toward hysteria. There's also nothing much to like about the phenomenon. Starting with the word itself, which derives from the Greek hystera, meaning uterus, "hysteria" was originally defined as a neurotic condition peculiar to women. With those misogynistic roots, one would think the term had nowhere to go but up.

But no. Instead, hysteria became a social phenomenon, nowhere more evident than in this recent ridiculous mania over swine flu. As I understand it, statistically speaking your chances of contracting and dying from swine flu are significantly less than your chances of choking to death on a ballpoint pen (which 100 people do every year). They are a tiny fraction of your chances of dying in a car accident (43,000 annually) or from assorted gun violence (17,000). "Normal" flu kills around 36,000 people every year. And these numbers are just for the U.S. The swine flu hysteria is even sillier when considered in terms of global numbers.

So what prompted it? Why were/are people with about as much risk of contracting swine flu as someone living alone on a mountaintop all hysterical at the thought of going to school or getting on a plane or eating in a Mexican restaurant? Why were/are they flocking to already overcrowded ERs because they imagine their tummies hurt?

I've wondered about this personalization of peril before. I was doing some work for a company in Los Angeles right after 9/11. For a couple weeks after those horrific events, a few of the people in the LA office - none of whom had been personally affected by the attacks - were "too traumatized to come to work." Was this their way of empathizing? Of honoring the dead? Or was it an exploitation, however unconscious, of someone else's loss? I hate to think it was anything other than empathy - how dishonorable to attempt to make events like those of 9/11 about oneself!

Why join in the hysteria over something that, if you weren't hysterical, you would plainly see poses no imminent threat to you? Does feeling in peril make people feel important? Or maybe it's the opposite; maybe it makes people feel like they belong, like they're part of the community.

If so, too bad the hysterical community in question is such a silly, self-centered and wasteful one. If we could inject all the energy behind the swine flu hysteria into a community bent on improving healthcare for the poor - or, for that matter eradicating gun violence or fatal car accidents - we'd actually accomplish something important and lasting. Not to mention communal.