H1N1. Swine flu. Pandemic. Precaution. The scary words come in waves, and each voice on the radio or TV sounds more ominous than the one before it. Beware! Doom, doom, doom beat the drums in the undiscovered country lying ahead.

Oh, good grief. What is a parent to do? When I hear those ominous words, part of me wants to do this: Keep my kids at home and seal the doors against hostile viruses while waiting for some version of “dawn” with the medical cavalry charging down the hill to rescue us. Or I think about training them how to read symptoms in those infected “disease vectors” around them, arming them with tissue packs and little bottles of anti-bacterial hand spray. Or I tell myself it’s all for naught, and pretend I’m Sergeant Schulz: I hear nozhink, I see nozhink, I know nozhink.

It’s hard for me to see any moderation in the news about H1N1. Most days the lead story for every news program is about the coming catastrophe of illness. Seal your doors! Run for the hills! Other days it’s all about how things are completely under control; our precautions and vaccines will protect us. The people in those latter reports seem to relish reminding us that seasonal flu already kills over 30,000 Americans each year. So what do we do with that information? We’re not supposed to worry so much about several thousand more?

Only perhaps they are correct. Perhaps we should think more like the pre-haunting Scrooge: H1N1 is just nature’s way of correcting an imbalance, of decreasing the surplus population.

For those of us who have forgotten it with all the excitement over H1N1, there are actually two strains of influenza inflaming our immune systems this year. Along with H1N1 there’s the ordinary seasonal flu virus circulating, the offspring of last year’s seasonal flu. I have to admit I feel kind of sorry for this year’s seasonal flu virus. People are so unimpressed; it no longer demands as much respect as it used to. Now a virus has to have the potential to kill millions to get on the front page.

Life, however, is filled with risks, and the part of me that isn’t a paranoid, overprotective parent is actually curious, intrigued by H1N1’s pathology and the science involved in understanding this influenza upstart. Our immune systems don’t recognize this new virus. That’s what makes it so dangerous; it’s a “new” disease, and nobody has any immunity (ironically the virus doesn’t kill us — it’s the overreaction of our immune system that does us in). Basically, H1N1 is a crossdressing kind of virus, a transgressor that first caused animals to get sick. Somehow, somewhere – possibly here in the United States — that animal virus found a window of opportunity among new human hosts.

At any rate, let’s say the inevitable (or implausible) occurs, and we do get sick. Lots of us get sick. Then what? We’re supposed to keep our fevers, aches and the virus that caused them at home, preferably without a doctor’s orders, since we’re not supposed to bring our virus to the clinic, either.

As if that’s going to happen. When have employers (or now even schools) ever encouraged that sort of rational choice? And before answering that question, be honest. When was the last time we worked for an employer who told us to stay home if we had a fever or a ragged cough and sneezing fits? Here’s the usual message: Unless you’re on your death bed or have a doctor’s orders, I need your butt in here. Take a pill. Get over it. Tough it out. And even if our employer or school principal isn’t hanging over us, how many of us really think “our work” will get done if we don’t do it ourselves?

If H1N1 makes it past our household’s defenses, common sense will be our guide. The sick ones are staying home to sleep, drink plenty of fluids and eat some homemade chicken soup (unless she-who-makes-the-soup is sick, too, and we’ll have to heat up some Campbell’s instead). Getting healthy, just like staying healthy, means sleeping enough and eating enough of the right kinds of foods. That, and time, will be our only path out of it.

David Rask Behling teaches at Waldorf College and lives with his wife and children in Albert Lea.