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Commentary
GEN-X RISING: Power of a Looming Threat Andrew C. Thompson, Jul 15, 2009
Andrew Thompson
By Andrew C. Thompson UMR Columnist
There is always a Looming Threat somewhere on the horizon. When I was a kid in the 1980s, it was killer bees in Texas, poised to invade the rest of the United States.
Back in 1999, it was the Y2K bug. We were sure it was going to shut down everyone’s computers and cause passenger jets to fall from the sky when the clock struck midnight on December 31st.
Today the Looming Threat is the H1N1 virus. But to get the scary effect, you have to call it by its more common name: swine flu.
Our innate tendency to fear disease only increases when the disease is spread from animals to us. Think of how you felt when you first heard about mad cow disease. (For the record, bovine spongiform encephalopathy. But who can pronounce a name like that, let alone be scared by it?)
So take a disease with a name like swine flu and notify the public that it’s spreading around the country, and you’ve got a recipe for mass panic.
First, the facts. As of July 2, the Centers for Disease Control reported 170 deaths in the U.S. from the current swine flu outbreak. That number is sure to rise. But it’s nowhere close to the 36,000 Americans who die every year from the plain ol’ seasonal flu. And despite its “pandemic” status, the CDC also tells us that swine flu is no more deadly than the flu virus that we contend with each and every winter. Then again, facts don’t comfort once something has reached Looming Threat status.
A church member recently asked me if we were going to stop having the Lord’s Supper until the swine flu threat had passed. And she wasn’t the only one in the congregation who was willing to cease celebrating the sacrament.
There are over 37,000 deaths per year in the U.S. from auto accidents. But I’ve never had anyone suggest we should stop coming to church until the “traffic threat” has passed.
So what’s the difference?
It has to do with control. Getting behind the wheel of a car doesn’t scare us the way getting on an airplane does, even though flying is much safer than driving. We’re convinced we control our own destiny when we drive, so we’re fine with barreling down the highway at 75 mph.
But at least with airplanes, we can control whether we get on them in the first place.
Even scarier are those things we don’t control at all. They are the Looming Threats. And that’s why the swine flu is scary in the same way those swarms of killer bees were back in the ’80s. We have no control over the Looming Threats. All we can do is wring our hands and hope they don’t come to our neighborhood.
I think we could use some perspective on this situation.
Before we start barricading ourselves in our homes and waiting for the swine flu apocalypse, we need to connect what we say we believe with what is going on around us.
And we need to realize that all of our panic at the latest Looming Threat is really a symptom of our fear over the greatest Looming Threat of all: death.
“It is appointed for man to die once,” Hebrews 9:27 says. There’s no getting around that. Until Christ returns, every generation that is born will die. And if that were the final word, we’d have every reason to head for the hills.
But we have been baptized! And our baptism is a baptism into Jesus’ death. Being buried with him through baptism, we are given the promise of resurrection with him as well (Romans 6:3-4). And the same love that led Jesus to the cross for us is the kind that casts out all fear (1 John 4:18).
So wash your hands thoroughly. And use hand sanitizer if you want. But don’t panic. The Looming Threats come and go, but we have a promise that remains steadfast.
The Rev. Thompson maintains a blog at www.genxrising.com. andrew@mandatum.org.
Andrew Thompson
