What Never Was Is Ubiquitous

I never realized how many silver Honda Civics there are in this world until I bought one back in 2000. Was it that I was just unobservant or that there was a sudden spike in their popularity with the new model. Who knows. This disparity between what is and what we realize can be somewhat unnerving, when we consider examples for are serious than silver Civics.

What was: I never used to notice people walking around with respiratory masks.

What is: Last month the news was a'flutter with the Andrew Speaker case--the lawyer from Atlanta diagnosed with an acute drug resistant form of tuberculosis. Six months prior there was another popular media case of a man incarcerated by the local sheriff in a county jail because he refused to wear a respiratory mask to protect the public from his resistant form of TB. Now I see about 1 person every other day on the Metro with these masks. Where were they before...not wearing the masks, or just not on the Metro? It does make you wonder, if it is the former case, what bugs we could have potentially been exposed to. Though an alternative hypothesis could be that these people are now just overly paranoid as a result of the two high profile TB cases in the media.

Just as the Andrew Speaker case brought attention to our the laughable Homeland Security systems and the inability of the CDC to prevent the potential spread of infectious diseases, I now have a feeling a similar hypersensitivity will occur as a result of the Minneapolis bridge failures. Will we become more paranoid about where we drive? Lord knows people will avoid the beaches once a few shark attack stories hit the news (see the over-hyped "Summer of the Shark" if you don't believe me).