Shaking All Over

After exchanging handshakes yesterday with a few dozen people that I hadn’t seen in three months, I was curiously compelled to wash my hands. I’ve never been germophobic before, never given it much thought, but for some reason I wondered what manner of microscopic bacteria I had accumulated in my quick round of social exchanges. Maybe it's because I got the flu this winter, which is rare for me. I've read that the increased frequency of cold and flu in the winter has little or nothing to do with the temperature directly, but likely results from more people being indoors exchanging disease-carrying microbes. I’m not convinced that's true, but it sure might be.

In the spirit of election-year campaigning, I think it’s time for a change. It's time to take action. It's time for the handshake to go. After all, this social institution pre-dates germ theory, which really didn’t go mainstream until the 20th century. But in our modern-day enlightened state it has become an anachronism. Hands are extraordinarily useful tools and thus routinely leave their bacterial tailings to form new colonies. Think of your TV remote control as a mingling place for one-celled fungi, a banister in your house as a microbe convention center, or the average doorknob a virtual singles bar of lusty germs just waiting for an opening to snuggle up to a warm-blooded body. This is not to mention public places, where billions of micro-organisms of unknown origin and with nary a background check quietly live from hand to mouth in our airports, theaters, stadiums and schools.

Now I know where my hands have been, but what about Jim’s, who gripped me firmly and greeted me with what I now think may have been a diabolical smile? Is Jim a nose-picker? Did he use his fingers to clean the wax out of his ears this morning, or worse yet, to attend to an itch in the most unpleasant of orifices? Did he scratch his head to check for dandruff? Does he leave a public bathroom by pushing on the door with his hand, heaven forbid? Did he even wash his hands after toileting, and if so, was he in too much of a hurry to use soap? The mind doesn’t have to wander far to find a lot of troubling places hands are likely to be. My goodness, they are still the appendage of choice for trapping the slimy discharge from a sudden sneeze—the Burning Man of all pathogenic social gatherings.

I don’t personally have a firm proposal for replacing the handshake ritual. The Japanese bow seems like a perfect solution, but our American culture is proud by nature and would abhor its symbolic subservience. I also like the way some Europeans kiss cheeks, but that has way too much baggage in our traditionally homophobic culture, and I refuse to import anything so fundamental from the haughty French. Hugs are too personal for a business setting, plus most people are not very good at them (although perhaps they could improve with practice and a few lessons). The notion of touching foreheads is also intriguing, right until I think about the time I met Shawn Bradley. We even might consider some of the gestures that have emerged from the sports world—like the fist bump, which is high in cool factor, or the forearm bump, which is less so. But definitely not the chest bump, which would be terribly awkward between the sexes and, in this silicone age, potentially fatal.

We’re an adaptive species by nature and I’m sure we could figure something out. We just need the motivation. I read about a town that outlawed handshakes during a flu epidemic, which probably couldn’t pass muster with our Supreme Court, but is a fanciful idea for congressional action. But I really think this more of a grass roots thing. So in the masculine spirit of the handshake I propose we make a gentlemen’s agreement to start by discontinuing the practice between ourselves? OK? Let’s shake on it.