10/17/2014
Ebola In America
The fatal weakness of American culture is now playing itself out in the most horrific fashion, making the daily news seem like something in a "Stephen King" novel. That weakness is our own incredible arrogance and its accompanying propaganda that has drummed a false sense of immunity into our culture for years.
The ignorance and emotional exploitation of the media is almost criminal. For example, instead of devoting precious air-time to educating the public about actual techniques of treatment of people with ebola-like symptoms, the tv hosts and pundits spend all their time on blame-mongering and on pre-empting any real discussion with name-calling. If anyone were to ask those reporters to investigate the questions of what we face if an ebola-contagious person is actually in the street and for some reason attracting the attention of police, then infecting police and patrol cars and even the local jail or courthouse before the symptoms rise to the level of hospitalization, if anyone were to ask this question, the reaction is immediate screeching assault on the reporter's integrity instead of on the logic of the question.
No one wants to face the fact that an ignorant person chose to travel to another state in order to BUY A DRESS while being "monitored" for ebola after treating at least one ebola patient in Dallas, Texas. While that person is being accused of having minimized or denied her symptoms when asking CDC for approval to travel, no one wants to ask the obvious question of the Center for Disease Control (CDC) which ignored the obvious: If you are flying in a plane to a distant place while carrying a disease that MIGHT manifest contagious symptoms in the near future, you are risking contagion at any point where you might be stranded for any reason.
Oh, you mean to tell me no one has ever heard of passengers having to wait in close quarters on the tarmac for hours while some problem with a plane is resolved? No one has ever heard of being in a car accident while visiting a distant city? Even if the nurse who so irresponsibly decided to travel while on ebola-watch did tell the truth when she called the CDC for permission, the obvious lack of judgement falls on the incredibly ignorant answer she got from the CDC staffer who is obviously working above grade-level.
If the USA had sacrificed all common-sense decades ago when the left wing began its triumphant destruction of the American school system, we would not be burdened with criminally ignorant, delusionally egocentric public servants who ignore the most obvious facts: if you possibly are carrying a deadly contagion that may manifest within a week or two, you do NOT travel outside the known area of treatment of that contagion until you are past the "due date"!
If the hospitals are not automatically taking ALL who present ebola-like symptoms IMMEDIATELY into quarantine, they are exposing everyone in the emergency waiting rooms to the contagion.
THat includes all the various staff, emt's, police, and random individuals who pass within five feet of the waiting patient, who might be sitting in a chair next to some other people watching tv in the waiting room. Now, must we also ignore the typical population of a city emergency room? Besides children who may have injured themselves at play, elderly who may be having a stroke, and all the attendant relatives, there are drug addicts and other con-artists looking for pill prescriptions, mentally ill people picked up by police for evaluation, people injured in fights or domestic abuse, etc.
The person sitting there in the first stages of ebola may cough, sneeze, or puke on these people as well as on any surface that then remains contaminated for several hours. Many of the people you see in any typical big city emergency room will not be tracked as exposed-persons after the ebola patient is finally quarantined, because they will not have been patients, but they will have briefly contacted as they walked through on other business.
Are the police departments equipped to deal with contaminated officers and patrol-cars if they discover that they just arrested a disorderly person who was reacting to private knowledge of the onset of ebola symptoms? Or does the ebola virus scrupulously avoid infecting any emotionally or mentally disturbed individuals who might have come into contact with the surfaces contaminated by a contagious person in an emergency room?
What would have been the reaction if that irresponsible nurse's symptoms had begun to escalate too rapidly for her to return to Dallas, forcing her to become "patient zero" in another city?
I wonder why no one is considering how much of the motivation for people to join violent extremist groups is actually not political or religious at all, but is a reaction to a completely delusional dominant culture? This is likely not only in countries where the dominant culture has been imposed from outside, but also here in the USA where the dominant culture that is increasingly disconnected from common sense is imposed from within. Anyone who looks at a map can see that the ebola outbreak in Africa is far more threatening to the Arab countries than it is to the USA, and has bee for years. But no one mentions this.
We know that when quarantine of the diseased fails, then self-quarantine of the healthy becomes necessary. The actual culture of modest dress, restrained sexual relations, and sheltered lives of women and children that characterizes both Catholic and Islamic traditional communities is a culture of survival.
Catholic monastic traditions rose out of the plague-ridden aftermath of the collapse of Roman civilization and modern hospital practices rose out of those traditional cloistered communities. The upsurge of Islamic Sharia-law communities is happening in a very similar situation, but with a global technology that puts it on "steroids".
