Something Bigger Than Phil: An Agnostic Looks Up During the Swine Flu Outbreak

A few weeks ago, my partner and I were watching The Ten Commandments, as we always do during the Passover holiday. It's a fabulous bit of spectacle, isn't it: Moses goes up the mountain and comes down with wonderful hair, styled by the same person who did up Elsa Lanchester's mane after her tete a tete with the big guy. Moses has more or less seen the face of God in the guise of a burning bush, and it's kind of hard to tell if he was scared to the point of premature grayness, or enlightened to the point of natural radiance.

Either way, my favorite scene in the movie is the one where Moses puffs himself up like a Fugu out on Pharoah's lanai, and promises that all manner of hell will rain down on his people (including the lascivious and completely icky Edward G. Robinson, who is actually a Hebrew), and it does: hail the size of golf balls, water turning to blood, and fire appearing from nowhere is what we actually see, because Cecil B. DeMille knew they'd be such excellent visual effects. But then there's the other stuff that we only hear about: frogs, lice, flies, boils, locusts, darkness, diseased livestock, and death of the first born son, the last two of which are construed by many to be a metaphor for the end of human existence as we know it. Because you can have frogs, lice, flies, boils, locusts, hail, fire, and darkness, but if you've got nothing to eat and no way to procreate, you're pretty much screwed as a species, so to speak.

It's been hard over the last few months to not think of this stuff, even if you're not religious (and I'm not); I mean, how much can we possibly take? We have dealt with a greed so fetid and of such epic, Biblical proportion, that we speak of Bernard Madoff as the very devil himself. But scrolling backwards, what else have we been faced with? An unjust war perpetrated for the sake of filling the pockets of our former leaders while millions lay dead or maimed? Untold scores of soldiers coming home to few benefits, no government help, and possible foreclosure thanks to a deceitful mortgage business designed to prey on those who want their piece of the American Dream? The patent flouting of the Geneva Conventions? Extraordinary rendition to avoid having blood on our hands? The destruction of a major American city while grossly incompetent Bush cronies look the other way? Melamine in our baby formula? Melamine in our pet food? Outrageously inhumane and greed-driven treatment of sick cattle destined for slaughter and subsequent introduction into our beef-heavy food supply? The broad television advertising of prefabricated, chemical sweeteners as safe and healthy and meant to be infused into virtually every snack food, while an estimated 32 percent of American children suffer from obesity, and millions of adults from diabetes? Factory farming so widespread that the environment has been irreparably impacted, and millions of animals "grown" as food exist in disease-ridden squalor? And now, the knowing contamination of a poor Illinois neighborhood's drinking water for two decades by local officials while the EPA looked the other way?

At this point, if frogs rained down from the heavens, I wouldn't be the least bit surprised.

Nevertheless, the question that keeps careening around my brain is a simple one: how is it possible for us -- a reasonably intelligent species -- to think that there wouldn't be some sort of tipping point to all this insanity? This is the old, what-goes-around-comes-around conundrum, isn't it. And we see it everywhere; I don't care if you're religious or you're not. The natural events of the last year are enough to make anyone scratch their head: consider the earthquake in China, the earthquake in Italy, Hurricanes Gustav, Ike, and Hannah. Now, from Mexico, comes Swine Flu. And as if looking like the town in the first scene of The Andromeda Strain were not enough, magnificent Mexico City was hit with a nerve-rattling metaphysical exclamation point in the middle of the outbreak: an earthquake.

Questions abound. Is travel safe? Probably not. The borders aren't being sealed for a reason: it's too late -- the flu is already here, and making its way around the world as we speak.

So what now? Will we ever learn? Likely no, because we never do. Instead, we point fingers; just this morning, Israel's deputy health minister, Yakov Litzman, declared the moniker "Swine" Flu offensive because it contains the name of an unkosher animal. Instead, he called it the Mexican Flu, which, of course, rightfully angered Mexico's ambassador to Israel. This reminded me of hearing boos coming from the audience when the Afghan Hound took to the Westminster Dog Show ring, days after 9/11. People are getting sick, and in poorer places, they're dying. What they need now is help, not raging idiocy.

There's a great line from The 2000 Year Old Man: the interviewer asks him when he first discovered that there was a being greater than himself.

"Well," he says, "there was this guy named Phil." Phil was very big and very strong and everybody was afraid of Phil. But one day, a lightening bolt came out of the sky and hit Phil, and set his hair and his clothes and his beard on fire. "And we all looked up and said 'there's something bigger than Phil....'"

Whether you believe or you don't is of little matter; what does matter, though, is the understanding that for every action there is a reaction. So when we treat animals like garbage and our food supply like a toxic dump, or our elderly and poor like they're invisible, or we let our leaders take money out of the pockets of the indigent to instead line their own, or we let every facet of our lives revolve around unabashed greed, there's bound to be an upshot.

That upshot is now.