One of these days, all our panic will prove justified

Even if it isn't Swine Flu, one of these days, something nasty is going to kill a whole bunch of us. And, even though everyone told us it was coming, we're going to be surprised. Especially those of us old enough to remember the Cold War.

As kids, we heard from adults that the Soviet Union was going to drop an atomic bomb on our school. We were to place our hands over the back of our necks, duck our heads under our desks, emerge from the nuclear blast unscathed and head down to the bomb shelter in the school basement, where we would be greeted lovingly by the lunch ladies with stockpiled cans of SpaghettiOs and Dixie cups filled with Tang.

In our blissfully ignorant way, we kids actually were looking forward to that bomb.

But that bomb never came. The SpaghettiOs never got eaten. The Tang never got drank.

I couldn't be disappointed by the lack of a nuclear holocaust, and my interest in SpaghettiOs and Tang was driven more by seductive marketing than by culinary cravings, but I began to question authoritarian warnings. If the authorities made us take all these precautions for something that never happened, what else had they made us do for no good reason?

The evidence was overwhelming:

• Not a single classmate caught his death from pneumonia by venturing outside without a stocking cap, even ones who taunted death by neglecting to cap wet hair.

• "Ran with scissors" wasn't listed as a cause of death.

• We never met any adult whose face had frozen in a ridiculous cross-eyed, tongue-out position he had perfected as a kid.

• There was no evidence that swimming 59 minutes after eating led to a cramp-induced drowning.

(Admittedly, there was one boy who shot his eye out with a BB gun, but he seemed to be the exception and not the rule.)

Time after time authorities panicked us about stuff that never happened. Then they made us learn the fable of the boy who cried wolf. That is how cynics are made.

One of my very first newspaper stories was an interview with a man selling construction helmets with bulls eyes painted on the top. His Skylab Helmets were to protect folks from the falling debris of Skylab, a 100-ton space station that touched off a hysteria of sorts when it began plummeting toward Earth.

Skylab did crash on July 11, 1979 - not onto defenseless school children never taught to put their hands on the back of their necks and duck their heads under their desks - but across a swath from the Southeastern Indian Ocean to a sparsely populated area of Western Australia, resulting in no deaths.

I was forced to work on Dec. 31, 1999, as part of this newspaper's Y2K coverage. We feared blackouts, airplanes falling from the sky, communication failures and computers draining bank accounts as they returned us to 1900 and forced retail clerks to make change for a $20 bill with no calculator input. Even kids who protected their necks and got under desks would not be spared the wrath of Y2K.

But we all woke up on Jan. 1, 2000, with no Y2K hangover.

We (at least those of us in the public) weren't warned about the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, so we panicked afterward. Peptic ulcers killed 53 percent more innocent Americans that year than anything linked to Osama bin Laden, but those ulcers didn't generate anywhere close to the fear of another attack. We bought sheets of plastic and duct tape to protect us from chemical and biological attacks that can't be repelled by hands on the neck. Some workers in the building formerly known as the Sears Tower, not content with sticking their heads under their desks, bought parachutes so they could jump to safety.

We've been whipped into fear-based frenzies by Lyme disease, West Nile virus, SARS and Bird Flu - all of which are bad and create real sorrow, but don't kill nearly as many Americans as does boring old syphilis, encephalitis, gall bladder ailments or flu without animal names.

The flu kills about 60,000 Americans each year, but we don't seem to get as excited about it as we have about the Swine Flu that has killed more than 150 people in Mexico, one in Texas and probably will kill more. It's in the suburbs, and that is sad and scary.

Meanwhile, the hog industry and pork-prohibiting religious groups don't like the misleading name Swine Flu. Nobody does.

So let's just call it the Wolf Flu. That way, when it does kill us skeptics, at least we'll appreciate the irony of being done in despite the warnings of the authorities who cried, "Wolf Flu."