Ebolamania

I'm not one to buy into mass hysteria.

I've never lost sleep worrying that aliens were going to abduct me, or that I would receive an anthrax-laced letter, or a package in the mail with a return address of "Unabomber." I don't have an irrational fear of Obamacare death panels, or a globalized one-world government designed to subvert our Constitution, or the infiltration of Federal government agencies by the Muslim Brotherhood.

I don't believe Amazon is continuously conniving to find ways of keeping the 37 cents in royalties I make on book sales each month, and I don't think McDonalds is doing anything more disgusting to its meat than any maker of ground meat products has been doing for centuries -- ever hear of blood sausage?

Then there's the newest scare, the Ebola epidemic, the edge of which we presently stand so precariously close to we find it necessary to have the TSA taking temperatures of passengers arriving on international flights. I'm sure that process is being handled with the same efficiency TSA employs at all other stages of the screening process. (If they used a rectal thermometer, they could speed things up by taking temperatures and performing cavity searches at the same time. Sounds like good multi-tasking to me.) And Fox so-called News pundits are even calling for shutting down our borders until we all feel safe again, which is ridiculous. So long as middle-aged, overweight French-Canadians wearing Speedos continue to swarm the beaches of upstate New York every summer, I'll never feel safe.

You see, as horrible as Ebola is, it's just one more thing in a long line of things that could, under the proper circumstances, kill me. There were roughly 16,000 homicides in the United States last year, roughly 35,000 car crash fatalities, and roughly 580,000 cancer-related deaths. Even the common flu kills tens of thousands -- in some years hundreds of thousands -- of people worldwide, so Ebola is going to have to kick things up a notch for me to start sizing my kids for HazMat suits.

Under current conditions, I stand as much chance of contracting Ebola as I do of being struck by lightning while a shark bites off my leg in a crashing airplane in the middle of a hurricane.

But this kind of thinking doesn't offer any solace to those who are overdue for a really good panic attack over something beyond their control. Our culture has been conditioned to live in dread of the outside world for so long that we simply don't know what to do with ourselves if there isn't some great bogeyman sneaking around to fear. And what makes Ebola a really meaty candidate for mass hysteria is that there's no conspiracy theory needed to get the public all riled up about it. It's a contagious disease, pure and simple, and because one person has died and another has contracted the disease, we now have to shutter the windows and bolt the doors until the big bad virus goes away.

Well, I will have none of it, thank you very much. 

While I won't do anything silly to place myself in a precarious position -- such as, say, plan a nice holiday vacation to Liberia or Sierra Leone -- I refuse to live in fear. I will, however, avoid blood sausage, but who could blame me for that?

© 2014 Mark Feggeler

Effin Elf

I'm not a Scrooge by nature. 

I've been caroling many times in my life. I enjoy Christmas songs in November. I'm even a fan of decorations, eggnog and those acid-inspired Rankin and Bass holiday TV specials. And the meaning of the season is not lost on me.

When my brothers and I were kids, we reveled in our traditional Christmas morning celebrations that began when we descended the stairs to the main floor to empty stockings together in the living room. We'd eat some candy and play a bit before heading to the basement where the big tree, lights twinkling and surrounded by wrapped packages, awaited us in tinsel-draped glory. Christmas was as it should be.

Except for the elf.

Any area the elf inhabited was a zone of fear for me. During the day -- and only when I was not alone in the house -- I might dare to risk touching the thing to hide it from sight for a few days of peace. Eventually, however, someone would find it and restore the demonic idol to its station in the living room.

The elf, a horrid thing my parents delusionally found cute and endearing, emerged year after year to perch menacingly on our mantel. Dolls creep me out as it is. The idea of a felt-clothed, plasticine-faced doll staring down at me with that pervy smirk of his all December long was nearly intolerable. I kept expecting to wake up one morning to find it sitting on my chest trying to steal away my soul with some satanic spell chanted in rhythm to the jingling of its tiny bells.

Which is why I can't understand how so many families have bought into this latest Elf on the Shelf craze. As if the idea of a bearded fat man breaking-and-entering your house in the middle of the night wasn't bad enough, now there's a magical doll that moves around the house while you sleep?

Yesterday, it was in the kitchen!

Today, it's in the den! 

Tomorrow, you wake to find it on your nightstand smiling down at you like a serial killer... Doesn't sound like a holiday thrill to me. Sounds more like the plot of "A Very Chucky Christmas." 

I want to fall asleep dreaming of sugar plums and figgie pudding, not pass out from hyperventilation due to an elf-induced panic attack. My idea of yuletide fun is finding the correct ratio of nog to rum to nutmeg, not figuring out how to set my cellphone speed dial to 1-800-EXORCIST.

Fortunately for me, our children have shown no interest in acquiring their own elf. Our house remains an elf-free zone. Unless there is an elf somewhere in the house and he's just really good at hiding...



© 2013 Mark Feggeler