Swine Before Pearls

When the Black Death hit London, many thought that it was a sign of God's judgment on a decadent people. Dean John Donne pondered this question, and others, in his classic Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions, the work from which comes his most famous bit of prose: "No man is an islande..." through to "Never send to know for whom the bell tolls. It tolls for thee." Donne, convinced that he himself had the plague, knew that he was connected to the deaths of his fellow men. One man dying meant a death for him - in both the very literal sense of contagion, and the sense of him, and of the world he lived in, losing something each time a person died.

We, unlike Donne, have grown immune to tragedy. So, when the now-infamous Swine Flu hit the news, I paid very little attention. I don't usually pay much attention to the news, I have to admit. This was no different. It felt, like most other looming tragedies, not especially real.

The jury is still out on just how bad Swine Flu actually is, but, serious or not, it is most definitely real in my bit of the world. A school teacher, I am a moving target for every Disease of the Week, and now am working in the midst of what is coming to be seen by my colleagues as a circle of Swine Flu. Schools on every side of us are closing down - first Clifton Hill, then Thornbury, then Epping, then the West...Each extreme of my trainline and Department of Education region has this new disease. And, what with the thirty-day incubation period, there's every chance that we too have the disease somewhere in our midst and are just waiting for it to emerge.

So naturally, each time someone gets a cold, the question, partly flippant, partly serious, is, "You don't have Swine Flu, do you?" One of my friends at work told me yesterday that her brother's school has it now. She lives with him. We walk and talk with the potential of disease each day.

Am I overdramatising this? Not really. Most of the time, I'm not especially concerned. But last night, when I considered doing my standard soldiering-on act at work today despite having a bad cold, I had second-thoughts on hearing my housemate, also a teacher in the North-West, say that her principal had ordered them all to stay at home if they felt at all sick. Normally happy, I suppose, to share whatever particular contagion I'm carrying, I felt that now was perhaps a time to keep it to myself. I seriously doubt it's anything more than the standard sore-threat-and-runny-nose that normally accompanies the onset of winter for most Melburnians - but, at a time like this, it doesn't hurt to be cautious.

But it's more than that. The normal response for a teacher, when sick, is to think, "But I can't afford to miss classes today. I'll have so much to catch up on." Only, now I'm thinking also about what effect a quarantine would have on end-of-semester assessment and exams, report-writing, and my planned trip to two of the world's Swine Flu hotspots in less than three weeks' time. Thinking about all that makes me realise: if my school, my life, is hit by the disease, it won't be up to me to decide what I can and can't afford to miss. Everyone's lives will be rearranged dramatically, if only for a time.

I doubt that Swine Flu says anything special about the decadence of our society today - certainly nothing more than you can tell from watching Video Hits on a Saturday morning, or looking at the glossies at the Supermarket checkout. But it says something less than ideal when a society can't afford to get sick. It suggests, I think, a bad case of priorities out of order.

I'm going to have a sleep this afternoon, and hope to rearrange some priorities before I go back to work tomorrow.