Yesterday, there was a diary on the Rec List calling for President Obama to close our borders to West Africans for fear that Ebola was going to spread like wildfire in the US.
I was very disappointed in the diary and shocked by the number of people who I thought had impeccable progressive credentials who recommended it. It was a diary filled with fear. Irrational fear for sure, but intense enough to cause many or us to abandon their progressive views and focus on their fear, which lead them to demand a ban flights to West Africa and to ban anyone - American citizen or legal resident from returning to the United States if they visited the area most affected by this disease.
The comments were ful of debates over whether this Liberian man, who came to the US to visit his son'd family, should be prosecuted as a criminal. His crimes: he tried to help a pregnant 19 year old get medical attention and then carried her home after they were turned away by one or more hospitals and he flew to the United States for the family visit.
Many Kossacks demanded that this man be prosecuted to the full extent of the law for not acknowledging that he had contact with a young, pregnant woman who may have had Ebola (when I first wrote this, I had inadvertantly written 'AIDS instead of Ebola). My subconscious was reverting back to the last time we were overcome as a society by irrational fears about a disease. The diseases are alike in some respects. They are both hard to transmit and it seems that many people feel the need to blame the victims because that enables them to objectify them.
People debated, "what did he know and when did he know it" in regard to his exposure to Ebola. One commenter posited that it was a crime for him to infect 'innocent' victims. (Again we are drawn back into the ugly Eighties.) These calls for prosecution from some progressives echoed the reaction of Fox News and right-wing Republicans like Ted Cruz. Do we really want to prosecute people for helping their neighbors? Here is what I wrote yesterday:
What do you mean by "innocent people"? (5+ / 0-)
Do you mean Americans? Who are the guilty people? Are they Africans? What did they do to deserve an Ebola infection? Is it, perhaps, because they are another color and this country has a long history of not being bothered by the deaths of people of color
I think this diary and much of the commentary views people outside of America as expendable. The only thing that matters is keeping ourselves safe. Let the other poor bastards die. Just so long as they aren't our friends and family.
I am angry and I am sad. Once again we see a molecule that brings out our primitive selves. The lizard brain takes over and fear overwhelms our better instincts. Only this time there are many progressives that seem to have succumbed to fear.
Josh Marshall at TPM had this to say in a post on the FOX News reation to Ebola;
Infectious diseases are scary - particularly airborne infectious diseases which are by definition more difficult to contain than those spread by bodily fluids. But effective public health and infectious disease containment measures are an amazing thing. So it's particularly unfortunate when people's rage and ignorance about 'government' intersect with this kind of important work. Disease containment and culture war nonsense and paranoia are a bad combination.
Life is neither fair nor always terribly safe. My mother died in an auto accident when she was 37. I could get run over by a car when I go home from work today. And you could too. But we're very unlikely to get sick from Ebola, especially here in the United States.