Fear fits like a cheap bathing suit: It accentuates our flaws and reveals what would better be kept covered. It binds in all the wrong places.
And fear — itchy, ill-fitting and maddeningly uncomfortable — is the only comprehensible explanation for the more disturbing sentiments expressed in online comment forums.
Comments, by and large, provide an interesting snapshot of public opinion and an open forum for observation and exchange. They’re a useful yardstick for measuring the quantity of public interest in a particular topic or incident.
By that measure, response to Saturday’s essay by Doctors Without Borders nurse Kaci Hickox blew the top off the public-interest chart.
Thousands of commenters weighed in after Hickox, a University of Texas at Arlington graduate, wrote a first-person essay published over the weekend in The Dallas Morning News. In it, she protested her airport detention and forced quarantine when she returned to the U.S. on Friday after helping treat patients in Ebola-stricken Sierra Leone.
Hickox, who has twice tested negative for the Ebola virus, was the first person placed under mandatory quarantine rules adopted by some states as infection-control measures. Her protest echoes medical experts and epidemiologists who argue that quarantining asymptomatic travelers is an ineffective, counterproductive measure that might discourage volunteers from helping fight the outbreak in West Africa.
She also protested her personal treatment. In a fresh instance of hysterical Ebola overreaction, she was detained for hours with little explanation by Newark, N.J., airport officials. She was then transported with an eight-car police escort to a hospital, where she was placed in an isolation tent equipped with a portable toilet and told to stay put for three weeks.
In reality, she stayed only three days. New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie relented and said she could go home to Maine, provided she got clear of the Garden State as soon as possible. I suspect she was happy to comply.
All this set the stage for a lively debate over personal liberty, public interest, federal policy and state initiative.
That’s entirely appropriate. It’s the same kind of debate we have over hundreds of issues that demand a tricky balance between liberty and safety, between personal freedom and public security.
What’s harder to understand — to “process,” in the contemporary argot of talk-show psychology — is the deeply disturbing streak of nativist paranoia that Hickox’s experience reveals. While it’s something of a relief to see the Ebola Derangement Circus transfer its headquarters out of Dallas, it’s unnerving to see Hickox reviled as “stupid,” “selfish,” “moronic,” “incompetent” and “self-absorbed.”
This is a bizarre, through-the-looking-glass inversion of the respect ordinarily accorded to relief and rescue personnel. In what upside-down universe is it “stupid” and “selfish” to provide volunteer medical care to the sickest, poorest people on the planet?
It’s beginning to feel like I’m shouting down an empty well, but the Ebola virus poses an infinitesimally minute risk to Americans. If you want a government guarantee that we are are 100 percent safe from the the most serious threats, it’s time to outlaw alcohol, vaccinate people by force, revoke licenses for drivers under 30 and confiscate every privately owned gun in the country.
Yet the same people who would respond with shocked outrage to any such trespass on personal liberty seem happy to condemn Hickox and other aid workers who have tried to fight the Ebola virus through what science says is the most efficient means: by working to control the epidemic at its source.
Too many commenters, sadly, seem to place a much higher premium on American than African lives. Their sentiments sail awfully close not only to hysterical isolationism, but to outright bigotry:
“She is so helpful to Africans, but doesn’t seem to care one whit about Americans,” one scathing comment read. Or this: “This nurse’s time would be more beneficial helping with our quarantine procedures here than helping sick kids in Africa.” Or this: “She cares more about helping sick foreigners than she does about protecting Americans.”
One commenter wrote bitterly: “I blame a lot of this mess on the missionary doctors who go to that dump to help.”
Can you imagine relief workers at a natural disaster or disease outbreak in this country being “blamed” for going “to that dump to help?”
Fear is an ugly outfit. It makes you look awful.
Wear it if you want to, but you don’t have to. You can always pick something else.
