Swine Flu

Cough cough.
No matter what, someone's going to say something about swine flu. Coughing isn't even one of the symptoms, but they'll say it anyway. And have you heard the joke about Obama? I heard about swine flu while I was lying on the back seat of my grandmother's car, just about ready to die of fever, so of course my first thought was that I had it. I was dramatizing the thing before the radio report was half finished.
"What's the big deal with all this?" I asked one of the other dorm girls. "It sounds just like regular flu to me."
"Nothing really. It's just different. And some people have died."
But people die of the regular flu all the time. Granted, there are news reports during flu season, but the president doesn't worry himself about it.
"Haven't people died from swine flu?"
"In Mexico, yeah," I answered another girl the next day, "but not here."
That was a Friday. I'd already had my SAT postponed because there was an outbreak of swine flu at the highschool that was hosting the test. I still don't quite believe it. An epidemic in teh high school my mother graduated from.
On Monday, the girl I'd talked to on Friday told me that a baby had died of swine flu. "You were saying nobody was going to die here, and now someone has. It's like karma."
"I didn't want the baby to die!" I wailed. She tried to assure me that wasn't what she meant, but it was too late. The whole thing just wasn't funny anymore.
I still make jokes about swine flu. But I can't shake the fact that we're laughing about something that kills people. It probably won't kill me, but does that matter? I can't decide. If people didn't laugh about it, they'd just freak out. But is making jokes disrespectful to the dead?