This one question leads to a list of others:
- How did they get here? Commercial flight? Private?
- What precautions were taken on the flights?
- What was done to clean and clear the planes after the flights?
- Were those planes put back into commercial service here in the US?
- Who did the cleaning?
- Where, when, how, and by whom were the cleaning materials disposed?
- How many people were on theses flights?
- How was their safety considered?
- How did they come into contact with the Ebola victim and his/her caretakers?
- How were these people protected from contracting or carrying Ebola?
This is just a short list. This is a list that back in the olden days before journalism rolled over and died in favor of supporting pet causes and political favoritism would have been the questioning line to the government, to the Centers for Disease Control, to the airlines, to Homeland Security, and to anyone else a real journalist could pin down and ask a pointed question.
We cannot look to the president of the United States for answers, because he is not a serious man. He waves off the work of his office with dismissive hand gestures, lame attempts at hip humor, and whining about the hatin' haters who are hatin' on his folks who tryin' to get the work done if not for the hatin' haters. In a less serious scenario than importing a deadly virus with no cure that delivers an horrific death to its victims, this might be a way to address thing other than the topics of state.
We cannot look to Congress, right or left, because they are so polarized by the unserious president and their own concerns for power and control, we might as well not have Congress.
If Ebola doesn't frighten a body it's because we are first worlders and we haven't a clue how it is to watch a person die from it. For years, we have watched and read, and heard about it as it flares up in some far flung unfortunate African nation--so remote from our understanding that we don't even say a prayer that it doesn't jump to someone outside that country, hop a plane to Atlanta, and land in a busy flying hub in the United States of America. Will never happen, we muse. They won't let it. They? They are all of a sudden not only letting it--they are purposely allowing it--actively permitting and facilitating the possibility of infection of thousands and horrific deaths of American people.
We have no collective memory in this country of uncontrolled death by contagious disease on a large scale in this country. No one remembers the Spanish Flu Pandemic of 1919 that swept the world--including the United States and took out millions. Whole families in every little community of this country were wiped out. You can go to just about any cemetery of an older town and find the
pandemic victims of that era laying in their quiet graves with headstones side by side indicating a lost family. We have no memory of empty streets and the few people on them even in our largest cities walking around with their faces covered for fear of contracting the flu. We don't know the grief of death. Modern life, medicine, and better living through chemistry has eradicated the way death stole into communities and took down the healthy and the weak--the young and the old without distinction. Many people have only the experience of losing a grandparent--someone whose time had come, and rightly so. We have been comfortable in the natural order of death: the old, the sick, the weak, the suffering. Throw in an accident here and there, the inexplicable cancer in a the young friend of a fiend of a friend-but by and large, we can explain the death we encounter these deaths and so--we do not know death
We think we are in no danger of an Ebola pandemic happening to us now--Ebola only happens in Third World countries where they don't have running water and internet connectivity. It's over there. It will run it's course before it gets to over here. A few doctors, nurses, and other admirable souls who care will die ministering to the victims over there and then it will die out and we won't hear of it again until later.
Only not this time. The government of the United States of America has brought Ebola to us, landed it in one of the busiest airline hubs in the country, has exposed the entire community in Atlanta to this horrific sickness and death with no cure, and is also apparently allowing it to stream over the border along with untold other diseases that we have handily controlled in this country for the last 75 years.
I hope we don't have to learn the lessons of stupidity and hubris and grief and suffering that our government has brought to us--a lesson that was learned by our ancestors almost one hundred years ago.