Pastel masks, school cancellations, travel restrictions and fear. The H1N1 virus is here, in our backyards. No matter where you are now, the swine flu could be waiting for you. It could be lurking on the head side of a 50-cent piece handed to a hardware store cashier in Dickinson County, Kansas or it could be inhaled by some poor district attorney in Boston while he̢۪s using the toilet.

The national media is in a rampant frenzy. Life as we know it may be coming to a nasty end.

Despite the fact that more than 20,000 people die of your everyday, run-of-the-mill influenza and millions more battle the virus every year in the United States, the swine flu is said to be far worse.

Yes, my friends, a global pandemic of epic proportions is sweeping across the face of the earth with the voracious appetite of a swarm of mutant locusts. So far, the death toll is at a suspected 150 in Mexico. In the U.S. the death toll is at a staggering one. Making the avian flu scare of 2005 look like a case of athlete̢۪s foot.

Photo by Clem Murray / Philadelphia Inquirer /McClatchy Tribune

I am reminded every day of the new cases of the insidious swine flu by the good people at CNN, who have taken it upon themselves to be our guardian angels in this “valley of deathâ€Â we all find ourselves. Brave souls like Dr. Sanjay Gupta are venturing south of the border and into the belly of the beast to find answers for the American public. After all, if we want to beat this thing, we have to be educated. This isn’t just some normal killer flu we see every year, its H1N1, the flu that pump-fakes.

109 people across the United States have sadly been infected with the life-sucking virus since it surfaced last week, and the numbers are growing. The healthcare professionals around the U.S. are not testing people as a rule, just kind of guessing as to what kind of flu the people have.

This small, parasitic animal could have found a way to outsmart humans. It seems the swine flu will become more aggressive if we seek it out through actual scientific methods, so we are forced to just keep using the speculation method of identification.

If it looks like the everyday flu, sounds like the normal flu and smells like the simple flu; it could definitely be the swine flu.

With the horrifyingly “mildâ€Â symptoms that patients are describing and the death rate at a grim one percent, it looks as though we are going to have to accept the fact that the swine flu is here.

All we can do now is keep watching CNN until we all become paranoid and stop going to baseball games, barbecues, concerts, poetry jams, the X-Men Origins: Wolverine movie, snype hunting trips, pie-eating contests, “Save Darfurâ€Â rallies and a host of other noble endeavors.

Let’s not forget to stay away from places of business. The last thing we want to do is exchange money with proprietors of goods during this delicate state we find our country in. Yield to the fear, CNN depends on it.