 "Photo: Christina Klein")
Well, it’s official: The National Bio- and Agro-Defense Facility will be moving onto the K-State campus. Like many of you folks — especially those who are currently afflicted with hoof-and-mouth disease — I am excited.
Finally, a research facility that will cater to us rubes who can’t stop ingesting the feces of or copulating with our diseased livestock.
Seriously though, I am excited about NBAF — about the money it will bring to the Manhattan area as well as the potential for an extremely hazardous outbreak of highly toxic biological organisms.
Actually, “terrified” would be a better word than “excited” for that last one, but still, there’s a wave of adrenaline coursing through my body. For the past three nights, in fact, I have been lying in bed, wide-eyed, just imagining all the possibilities.
The mere thought of all those NBAF scientists bringing their huge pocketbooks to Manhattan-area businesses has me all giddy.
Just imagine, folks: By day these scientists will be handling rare, noxious diseases, and by night they will be eating at the local Dairy Queen.
One minute they will be handling the deadly Hendra virus, the next minute they will be buying a Barney and Friends lunchbox for their kids at K-Mart. Who cares about the recession now? We’ve got NBAF!
On the downside, should an accident or terrorist attack on the NBAF facility occur, the K-State campus will become like the tenth level of hell, with students and faculty running for their lives as a large toxic plume of airborne viruses enters the local atmosphere. After those in the vicinity breathe in these deadly toxins, they will most likely puke out their internal organs and bleed through their eyeballs.
Not that I’m trying to scare you. I’m sure that NBAF, when it comes to Manhattan, will be a great asset to K-State and to Kansas in general. There is no reason to panic. In fact, I am intrigued by the notion of possessing a third or fourth arm or a glow-in-the-dark head, just so long as it means getting some extra cash in the university, city and state coffers.
Money is the point, after all, and though Texas lawmakers have been fighting Kansas to wrest the NBAF research facility from its future home — even threatening legal action because of what they claim was an unfair selection process by the Department of Homeland Security — perhaps we can all take comfort in the fact that, after a long, tiring, and costly lawsuit, Kansas will probably prevail. Maybe. Probably. It will.
Then, in our triumph, and for many years to come, Kansans can bask in the pale blush of sunlight creeping through a dense mixture of smoke billowing from the new coal-fired power plants out west and green-tinted fumes emanating from the NBAF facility right here in our local community. The neon sunsets alone will be worth it.
