ALEX MACPHERSON
Opinions Writer

Despite constant apocalyptic visions of a post-swine flu world enumerated by the media and virtually every public institution in the country, I have elected to abstain from receiving the (so far optional) inoculation.

Since the growing list of reasons for and against the swine flu shot is long and life is comparatively short, I will offer a paradigm: painful and untimely death versus sociopolitical deviancy. I choose deviancy based solely on my unwillingness to join in the hysterical mob, the tempestuous gang whose sole purpose in life, it seems, has become the spread of paranoia.

Although succumbing to the mass derangement currently sweeping our country is understandable and perhaps even wise, my opposition to the idea of a flu shot is based not on my own safety, but on my disdain for those who fuel this sort of panic. And this sort of panic is nothing new; in fact, it’s become a cliché.

There is no one alive capable of reciting the list of supposedly malevolent pandemics that have failed to materialize. Disease panic is getting old, yet the delusional mob persists, mindless of the fact that they are, eventually, going to die anyway.

There is no question that our world is a dangerous place. From the carnage on the nation’s roads to the solemn bedside farewells so common in its cancer wards, people are always dying.

The crux of the problem, however, is the emergence of a new hysteria based on speculation and conjecture. The sort of people who spread this nonsense are both masochistic and perverse; under the facade of maintaining life they pray for the appearance of a new cataclysm so they can drag from the cupboard their megaphones, hand-lettered signs and warnings of Armageddon.

Whether or not the swine flu actually materializes as the next great executioner of humanity is irrelevant; if every disaster lived up to its name, our race would be long extinct. More importantly, those who continue to predict health care catastrophes are woefully unaware of the only fundamental truth: death.

Yes, my friends, we’re all going to die. It could be tomorrow, it could be during your English exam (which, between you and me, would be spectacular) or it could be 59 years from now. We simply don’t know, which makes the rampant hypothesizing seem even more preposterous. While prolonging life may be ostensibly logical, it is, nevertheless, patently absurd.

Setting aside any non-secular arguments for an afterlife (deliverance or damnation, your choice), it seems reasonable to suggest that we ought to spend our limited time on Earth in the pursuit of pleasure and, consequently, minimizing pain and suffering. Life may indeed be as Hobbes suggested — nasty, brutish and short — but we need not endeavour to increase our misery. And spending a moment (not to mention weeks, months, years) worrying frantically about the next great pandemic does not conform to even the most pessimistic definition of “pleasant.”

And yet most of our society remains passionately committed to perfecting the art of worrying. They worry about neo-Nazis, obesity and gangrene; they worry about being stung to death by killer bees and being hanged in a miscarriage of justice.

People will worry about anything their minds can conceive. Because modern society has a prodigious capacity for panic — and consequently spends nearly all of its time predicting death and destruction — it has yet to realize that worrying actually causes death.

Well, not really. But it has yet to occur to them that every minute spent worrying brings them closer to their own rendezvous with the big “D”; worrying about the rigid immutability of death is wholly counterproductive. Rather than waiting in line for hours to receive an injection (which is bad enough) that could preclude the onset of the H1N1 or shrieking about the same flu on the radio, television and printed media, people ought to live their lives.

Only by accepting the fragility of life can we truly experience the sheer visceral pleasure of living. To deny death is to reduce the act of life to nothing.

Contemporary society has become obsessed with prolonging their own pitiful lives­ by any means possible. North Americans would rather have three extra bronchitic years than a lifetime of pleasurable cigarettes, and they much prefer the thought of frail hunger to obese pleasure.

Not surprisingly, I have little desire to join those who, through a constant state of panic and a predilection for apocalyptic thoughts, have rendered their lives all but meaningless. I refuse to bow to the pressure and receive the swine flu inoculation, and I abhor the notion of sitting around, waiting for death to strike.

The clock is ticking, and every second spent applying hand sanitizer brings me a second closer to the end.