Stalked by fears

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I've never had a flu shot, and I sure as heck won't get one this year. For one thing, I'm in that category of Americans deemed "expendable" and therefore not worthy of receiving whatever protection -- psychological or physiological -- a flu vaccine might afford: I'm a white, middle-aged male.

Even were I among the chosen few deemed by the government as sufficiently valuable to warrant a vaccine, I wouldn't get one. Consider it my personal protest against the politics of fear that has fallen across the country like a blanket since the September 11, 2001, terror attacks.

Now that the election is finally over, can we please get on with life? Life has always been inherently risk-laden. But in 21st-century America, life is becoming increasingly a search for the Holy Grail of security in everything we do, from flu to finances to flying, and from sports to politics.

The hysteria over the flu is but one example of the fear that pervades America and much of Western civilization these days. But if we can't come to grips with the reality of a tiny virus, how can we hope to come to grips with a worldwide terror network threatening our very way of life?

The flu -- influenza -- has been with us since time immemorial. And despite the advances in medical science that allow us to minimize its effects, the flu almost certainly will be with future generations for ages to come.

Every year, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, 15 million to 60 million people get influenza between October and May.

Of these victims, far fewer than 1 percent are hospitalized, and fewer than .01 percent die; that's less than 1 percent of 1 percent, for heaven's sake.

Sure, the flu is an annoying condition, with fever and muscle aches, but it is not the bubonic plague, which wiped out nearly half of 14th-century Europe's population.

Nevertheless, our national irrational hysteria pastime has ramped up again over this year's flu vaccine shortage . Americans cross the border in droves to get a socialized Canadian shot in the arm. Drastic emergency powers legislation pass in state after state to empower governors to criminally charge, if not burn at the stake, those who dispense flu vaccine to "low-risk" patients.

The CDC formed its own special ethics panel to weigh the moral questions about who gets vaccinated. (We need ethics in government, Lord knows, but a panel of ethicists to decide who gets a flu shot? Come on, folks, get a grip.)