How bad is the swine flu pandemic? Well, you know it's pretty bad when the world's flu experts start breaking out words that 89 percent of high school seniors probably don't know. (Pandemic means "prevalent over a whole area, country, etc." by the way.) But how's this for perspective: Mexico is shutting down. The whole country. FOR FIVE DAYS. You can now join me in saying, "Holy sh*t!"

But let's not freak out too badly, okay? I mean, unless the world's governments are using this as a cover for a zombie apocalypse -- and I haven't ruled that out just yet -- then the swine flu isn't something we haven't faced before. And beaten. Like back in the 1970s, when the following super-awesome PSA was made. Now, normally I wouldn't give something like this its own post...except for its rather comical juxtaposition of race, which is totally basketball-related.

At the 14-second mark, we are introduced to two young black men, dressed in grubby-looking t-shirts and jeans, playing basketball in what seems to be a schoolyard. One of them takes a quick breather to say, "Swine flu? Man, I'm too fast to let it catch me." (You then see him in bed with a thermometer in his mouth, presumably near death.) Next we see a white man. Or should I say, The White Man. Older, well-spoken, suited up, obviously wealthy and powerful with a huge desk and big comfy office. And he doesn't play some poor man's (i.e., black man's) sport like basketball. He plays GOLF. Every weekend! That's right, GOLF. The rich man's game. The white man's game.

In the big scheme of things, it's not that big a deal. After all, a lot has changed since the 1970s. Disco is dead (except for in certain prominent gay dance clubs), bell-bottoms (dorky!) are now referred to as boot-cuts (cool!), a black man is the best golfer on the planet, and a black basketball player is President of the United States. So, you know, those people in the 70s might as well have been living on Pluto. Which, as it happens, was a planet in 1970 but has since been reclassified as a mere dwarf planet...and only the second-largest one of those in our solar system. But it's still pretty funny to see how laughingly backward our Plutonian forbears were just a few short decades ago.

Labels: race relations, swine flu, zombies