Fear calls forth genius and folly but never in equal measure; the greater the fear, the greater the folly.
In the presence of Ebola or anything that threatens indiscriminate probable death, fear becomes rational. It certainly is an inevitable, natural response. Fear can be a strong call, piercing the miasma of false comfort and numbed inaction. Many a brave deed and innovative enterprise have been predicated on the cold slap of fear. Hysteria is of a different sort. It paralyzes logic, turning into madmen those who act out its passions. That the madness may be temporary does not require the damage wrought to be equally limited. History is littered with the flotsam that hysteria’s ugly hand has caused. Hysteria also is rarely a natural phenomenon. It is artificially induced, taking the kernel of fear and sowing it into a harvest of irrational dread. Generally, those who bestir public hysteria have ulterior motives beyond insulating themselves or others from the feared danger. They incite fear until it compounds exponentially, transforming itself into an acrid poultice of mistake, hatred, blame, illogic, prejudice and horrid superstition. With this in mind, we should weight the global response to the Ebola epidemic.
International reportage of Ebola should finally disabuse those of us who still adhere to the illusion that the major global media houses are committed to objective journalism. These media outlets have stoked hysteria and foreboding like an arsonist does fire. Their job has not been to objectively report the risks at hand and the progress made. Their mission was to strike fear so the public would say glued to their televisions. They did not set out to properly educate their viewers about Ebola. They sought to portray Ebola as marauding dread that would mesmerize the audience as much as their favorite action drama or reality show. They turned the nightly news into a horror flick or a sports contest where we were daily told the scores of infected and dead Ebola had netted. The casualties were no longer people but numerical symbols of the deadly victory Ebola was said to be winning.
The more lethal and contagious Ebola was perceived, the more the newsmakers could continue making news and keeping people fixed to their television channels. The media is no longer about journalism. It is a big and global business. Thus, like any business, the objective is profits which are achieved through the paid advertisements high viewer ratings induce. If the truth serves to profit the corporate bottom line, then the truth they will present. But rarely does the truth suffice. Thus, they simplify then inflate it; they distort into something the truth would not recognize but something the corporate sponsors see as befitting their investments. Journalism is no longer the pursuit; it is the vehicle by which profits are pursued with a bill collector’s vigor.
Yet, hysteria may arrive quickly but it never leaves without exacting a dear cost. The news of four Ebola cases sent the United States into near panic. The unfortunate Liberian who entered America with Ebola became the victim of umbrage and disgust. Xenophobia and racism were perceptible undercurrents. Not spoken in polite circles yet understood by all was the theme that nothing good comes out of Africa except sickness, war and death. On the lips of many Americans was the question: “Why let these people into our nation to destroy it?” The fear of dreaded disease merged with the historic hatred of black skin to produce an uncivil response to what was entirely a human tragedy. The people of Black Africa were all seen as accursed by reason of their origins and not as unfortunate victims by reason of the incidences of history over which they have exercised little control.
At the same time Ebola came, American was experiencing an outbreak of enterovirus d68. The virus had affected people in almost all fifty states. At least, five deaths were confirmed due to the sickness which seems to spread faster geographically than Ebola but is less fatal. News concerning d68 was minimal compared to Ebola although the number of deaths exceeded the total number of Ebola cases reported in the nation. Part of the reason for the discrepant attention was the steep lethality and dire symptoms of Ebola. This is understandable. It is fear at its most natural. But there is another more sinister factor at work. D68 was not as newsworthy because there was no outsider to blame. D68 was an American phenomenon and thus had to be tolerated with resolve and a stiff upper lip.
With only four cases in a population over 300 million, Ebola is limited to one person in every seventy-five million people. The likelihood of an American contracting Ebola was a fraction of that of being shot by a crazed gunman. However, Americans are more petrified of stricter gun control than of the maniacal gun-toters who on a weekly basis bring carnage to some school or shopping center. But there is no great outcry, no hysteria. There is only resignation to the fact that indiscriminant commerce in guns is woven into American life. Thus, cold-blooded, insane murder will also be part of the national fabric. However, Africans and their dreaded disease should not be. Thus, much of the fury and anger Americans should aim at correcting their own internal contradictions was hurled at the Liberian Duncan.
One can argue the morality of Duncan traveling to America given that he was cognizant of his exposure to the disease. Surely, it would it have been nobly self-sacrificing to have remained in Liberia. Yet, I dare not condemn the man for no one truly knows how he would respond if placed in similar circumstance. The best response is not condemnation but human understanding and empathy. That did not occur.
Duncan was begrudgingly admitted into the treating hospital. The treatment the uninsured black man received does not seem to have been inspired. At most, the hospital tried to manage his disease and not help him overcome it. To say the treatment received was minimalist would not be off-the-mark. This again exposes the intrusion of racism into every facet of American life even the administration of health care, which in some instances can be a decision of life or death for a fellow human being. It also reveals the moral emptiness of a health care system run as a business for profit instead of one that functions as a public service. In a profit-based system either you pay money or you pay with something dearer – your health or your life.
There is the gnawing sense that Duncan’s treatment was kept to the lowest minimum because those in charge were unconcerned whether Duncan lived or died. There was an unspoken yet strong disincentive to curing the man. They feared his cure would flash a green light to other Liberians to take the same route to better treatment. His death would constitute a red stop light. The trajectory of human affairs is forever distorted by the twist of irony. Three hundred years ago, Whites were removing the likes of Duncan from his homeland against their will. This time, he wanted to come; this time, they no longer wanted him. Justice eventually comes but it does not arrive quickly enough to come for us all.
Waiting for Mr. Duncan to get out of the hospital was the Dallas County Prosecutor’s office. They wanted to bring criminal charges against him although his actions fit no known criminal offense. Trying to ingratiate themselves to American authorities, Liberian officials also announced they wanted Duncan deported that he may face criminal charges back home. Faced with a ravaging epidemic laying down hundreds of people daily, Liberia had not the ability to manage the crisis at hand let alone divert inordinate attention to the lone man who got away. Neither the Texan or Liberian prosecutors would have their catch. Duncan never emerged from his hospital bed alive.
The two nurses who contracted the illness from Duncan have survived the worst. They shall recover. The New York City doctor contracted it while treating patients in Guinea. He is in isolation and will receive the finest care. Yet, his case sustains the hysteria. Across the nation hospitals have been visited by people who had not the slightest chance of possible contact with anyone who might have had contact with anyone exposed to the virus. People were rushing to the hospital because they were sweating after being outside or felt a pain in their stomach after eating too much. All the while, as they irrationally feared Ebola, they also irrationally cursed Africa and Africans.
Some of the invectives against Africa attached to President Obama. Racists opined he had not acted decisively because Ebola was an African disease and he wanted sick Africans to come and spread it on America. Thus, Obama refused to institute a travel ban on West Africa. The accusation is the height of animus. It is as senseless as it is vulgar. Yet, hatred has informed much of what has happened. Conservative Republican political leaders seized the opportunity to inflict additional political injury on Obama and other Democrats in the days before the important congressional elections in early November. Giving a nod and wink to the racists, they pronounced Obama’s handling of “the crisis” as casual and inattentive. They too blamed Obama for opposing a travel ban, failing to add President Obama was merely following the advice of the overwhelming majority of medical experts.
Last week, the president appointed an Ebola Czar, Ron Klain, to counteract the perception that his administration had lost control of this and other challenges. A consummate political insider, Klain has been Chief of Staff to the last two Democratic Vice Presidents (Gore and Biden). Klain’s medical background is that of a layman. He has no greater knowledge of infectious diseases that you or I. Clearly, he can add nothing of medical value. His mission is to halt the political hemorrhaging inflicted on the Obama administration by the withering Republican criticism.
Even the American military has got into the act. Not only has the President deployed several thousand troops to Liberia to help construct field hospitals and train local workers on basic medical procedures regarding the care of Ebola patients, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Martin Dempsey proclaimed Ebola to be a national security threat. If possible, he would recommend bombing the smithereens out of the virus. He would meet even less fortune in this endeavor as he is currently having in the air war against an advancing ISIS in Syria and Iraq.
The military has even established an Ebola rapid response force to deploy within America. This is lunacy. Once the soldiers get to the troubled person, what in creation will they do? The military’s incursion in domestic concerns far flung from its core mission, is troubling. Government funds for medical care and even the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) which is the lead agency on Ebola have withered. The military is so flush with money and power that it can freely invade the province of specialized civilian agencies although the military is ill-equipped to make anything good come out of the encroachment. This is another signal of the slow erosion of American democracy. The greater the military’s role in domestic affairs, the lesser becomes a nation’s democracy. Wherever the military enters, democracy leaves.
Strangely, the tradecraft of the military does have an answer to the mystery of Ebola. This goes not to the cure but the dissemination of the virus. Those nations that have suffered sustained outbreaks have one thing in common. They are nations laid bare by protracted civil war that have destroyed their national institutions included whatever rudimentary health care that might have existed. Before the current outbreak, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Sudan hosted the most severe outbreaks. Both those nations are sites of perennial war. Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea have also been victimized by ruthless war and unrest. The recovery they face will take several generations. Broken and impoverished by war, these nations became susceptible in a special way to Ebola’s contagion. War is often the first link in a chain of calamity. Where there is long war, pestilence shall follow.
This is not the first instance of disease riding the hind of war. As WWI was coming to a close in 1918, the Spanish Flu descended. It killed roughly 50 million people or over three percent of the global population in a matter of months. The disease was more deadly than the war. That the most deadly modern plague came on the heels of the first modern war is not coincidence. The conditions of war – trenches, chemical weapons, compact quartering of troops and civilians – as well as the social and material depravations inherent in warfare coupled to make this disease as deadly as disease can get. If a disease as fatal as the 1918 flu now laid siege, it would claim roughly 250 million people. This is equivalent to eliminating almost all of West Africa or five of every six Americans.
The dysfunction and disease that follow war are often more fatal than the fighting itself. That Nigeria has sufficiently intact medical institutions and that health care professionals and leaders on the ground had the will and courage to respond were the reasons the disease did not spread in Nigeria. Had the nation been then the throes of a complete unrest, the story would have different. Ebola would have marched the ravager’s march through the land. The lessons of war and now of Ebola are ample ones to make all of us rededicate ourselves to peace and stability in Nigeria and throughout the region.
The other aspect of the disease that has gone unreported is that the virus not only attacks poor, scarred nations but the most vulnerable of the people in these countries. Aside from infecting health care workers, few members of the middle or upper classes have been infected. The vast majority are the poor underclass who eat sparingly and whatever they can, including spoiled, diseased meat caught or paid for on the cheap. Water is even a luxury. Had they or their medical system the ability to rehydrate people on an ongoing basis, the mortality rate of the disease would lower significantly.
In the end, Ebola is a virus, a serious and deadly one. We can do nothing about its existence. The jeopardy of premature death is part of life. Yet, mankind can do much better in how we respond to this and other scourges. For in the quality of our response, we find our humanity or lose it. Whether we treat the afflicted and whether we act to mitigate the socio-economic imbalances that turn a disease into an epidemic have nothing to do with the severity of the illness. They have everything to do with the largeness of heart and love of mankind we care to live by so that others may not perish before their time.
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