The Sickness (Get Down With It!)
Osprey Edit: I’m leaving in a few minutes for a day and a half long train ride to Colorado. I have to go help my mom deal with stuff in my grandparents old house. I think I’ll be back the Friday after this Friday.
The dreaded idea: a plague of medieval proportions hitting the United States today. To make a long story short, all hell would break loose. Things would resemble some similarities to post-plague Europe, in that there would be a ton of land, and nobody to own it. There would be some huge differences though.
Thanks to air travel, it would surely spread even faster than the plague of Europe. However, this could be prevented, as in this day and age we don’t fear medicine. We quarantine the infected, and immediately try to find a cure. But let’s say that hypothetically, we didn’t contain it, or we couldn’t contain it. If up to fifty percent of the population died, we would be in serious trouble. Crime rates, post-plague would probably go down, though. This is a difficult and touchy subject, because there’s a fine line between saying “a lower population could aid our country in some ways,” and saying “Let’s go kill the people, for the people.” It would be an absolute tragedy, at the risk of sounding like I have dissociative identity disorder. From this point on, I’ll do my best to point all the bad things about this.

He supports genocide, and hes' one of the GOOD guys.
Our nation’s military would statistically have to lose members, which would leave us more vulnerable to enemy attack. Our nation’s work force would also statistically be lowered, which again is not a good thing. With the population of the United States being over three-hundred-million, an epidemic such as this could very well mean that up to one-hundred-and-fifty-million people could die! We wouldn’t have enough time to cremate a body before another dropped dead! If movies like “Doomsday” and “28 Days Later” have shown us anything, it’s that large urban centers with many people living close together are perfect places for outbreaks to start and spread. And back in the middle ages, the urban centers weren’t anything like today’s urban centers. Sure we’re cleaner (a lot cleaner), and have the medical advancements, but should an epidemic like this happen anyway, several hundred people could become infected simultaneously because one inconsiderate person didn’t cover their mouth when they coughed.

"Sorry, I thought I could breathe fire and I wanted to test it out."
I don’t think… At least I don’t hope that there isn’t an extremist movement like their was in the Medieval times. The funny thing about human nature is that we’re always trying to pass the blame. There WILL be people that blame God… or a god. Like the woman in “The Mist”, or that crazy man in the video-game “Deadrising”, who blamed the zombie apocalypse on mankind’s sins (although based on the story of that particular game, he wasn’t too far off… but I digress). But I have enough faith in humanity to assume that the people won’t begin inflicting pain upon themselves to appease God.
Sacrifice yourselves! It's the only way to survive!
I would like to think that on average, the people know enough about how diseases work, that they’d be careful. The Media will probably aid in giving people health tips… if not too excessively. Today people do individual research on diseases, and know enough about the human body to keep themselves from dying of the common cold. And we certainly aren’t going to deprive ourselves of white blood cells to help get the sickness out of the body. An outbreak of a plague-like disease today would probably NOT be as bad as it was in the middle ages, honestly.

Or... maybe there never was a "plague".
Culturally, it would definitely up the awareness on staying healthy. It’ll be a good kick in the pants for people who don’t regularly wash their hands, and whatnot. Lot’s of companies will probably end up shutting down. Whether it’s because your entire work-staff died, or because your customers fell ill to the dreaded disease. With companies shutting down, are economy will be in bad shape. But humanity will survive, as it always has. Eventually a resistance to the virus will be built up, and order will be relatively restored… even if it does come from some kind of tyrannical corporation selling safety in a giant aristocratic tower-city (Land of the Dead style).
And I apologize for brushing against the subject of Hollywood Zombies so much; the similarities just strike me as remarkable. And being a Zombie-maniac, I can’t got more than a few days without bringing them into conversation.
-KC Phillips























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