"Germs" are not for sharing #atozchallenge



Why I'm paranoid.

 One of my favorite miniseries movies is Stephen King's The Stand. The military has an accident with a highly contagious virus they're playing with, and it gets loose. Before all is said and done, the superflu kills millions. Those left are divided into two camps: The sweet old lady camp, and the crazy demon cowboy camp. I won't tell you what happens during the course of the movie in case you've never read the book or seen it, but I just love the movie.

Germs and viruses and flus, I don't love. My nephew, Aloshua (Losh) is on a ventilator and gets sick very easily, so germs are the enemy. We Lysol the heck out of everything, and then we do it again for good measure. Wipes, spray... we've got it all, and nothing is safe. We get strange looks for carrying Lysol spray around in our purses and using it on shopping carts before putting him in, but the reality is that people are gross, and we'd rather be looked at oddly than risk his health.


This is the enemy. Spray at will.



One of my biggest fears is that we're all gonna die in some catastrophe similar to that in The Stand. There may even be demon cowboys involved then, too. Inevitably, it will be entirely our faults because, as mentioned above, we're gross. We don't stay home when we're sick, or keep our kids home when they're sick. We don't wash our hands enough. And we think antibiotics is the cure all for everything.  People  use the bathroom (or sneeze/cough) without washing their hands, and then they touch stuff. And by stuff, I mean every freaking thing in sight, thus ensuring that whatever virus they're carrying around will inevitably be passed along to someone else.

That's going to bite us in the ass some day! And it wouldn't be the first time. During the 500s, the Plague of Justinian killed an estimated 40% of the population of Constantinople .When the Black Death swept across half the world in the 14th century, it killed as many as 100 million people. We've come a long way since those days cleanliness and hygenically speaking, but we're still our own worst enemies.

Earlier this year, the WHO released research on a man-made strain of H5N1 that has the potential, if ever released, to kill millions. That's in addition to the billion or so germs already floating around out there that, given the right conditions or however this stuff works, could mutate and infect humans. Not to mention any other germs we may or may not be playing with in labs.

I may be paranoid, but we've been crippled by these itty bitty germs several times before (see above). If anything causes armageddon in the future, why not a germ? My Lysol probably won't make much of a difference, but hey, at least I'll have died trying, right?!

This is me.

No A to Z'ing on Sundays, so I will be back on Monday with "H"!

Hoppy Easter to those who celebrate!

A.K.M.



Want more A to Z Challenge? You can read other Letter G posts here.

 

Don't forget the Hoppy Easter Blog Hop contest here this weekend! You could win a copy of Fade, my debut novel (you know, the one that sparked this whole Armageddon Alphabet idea)!