Posts

Showing posts from October, 2014

Post-millenial tension, ebola edition

Ebola is in the news these days. We have two cases of Ebola in the United States, and the national media is on DefCon 1. Meanwhile, the real crisis is in West Africa. This is where the world's focus needs to be. Instead, our national media is in full sensationalistic mode, the point where the only place I want to get my news--and a more rational approach--is NPR. Look, I know that a disease, in which one's survival is no better than a flip of the coin, is understandably frightening. And the way the missteps by the CDC and Texas Presbyterian Hospital (woefully unprepared for an Ebola patient) don't make things any less scary. But it does seem that both are making amends and doing their best to make up for their mistakes. Panic, conspiracy theories, and the "blame game" don't get us very far, though. And there has been plenty of that to go around recently. Americans seem especially skilled at concocting conspiracy theories or blaming someone else [cough, O...