America Needs to Break Its Addiction to Fear
I’m not sure when Americans got scared. Maybe the indigenous tribes of the plains spent evenings huddled in their teepees telling stories of twisted night creatures, maybe the nomads who trekked across that bridge from Russia to Alaska were running away from something. Whatever the case, by the time the white people showed up from across the sea and started putting women on trial for witchcraft and convincing themselves the natives were conspiring with Satan, fear was firmly established as the ruler of the continent and it hasn’t left since. The national anthem, like most of what you learn in elementary school, is mostly lies—forget the brave and the free, we’re the land of the terrorized, the home of the perpetually panicked.
That’s a sweeping, simplistic generalization, but it’s hard to find another explanation for what New Jersey and New York governors Chris Christie and Andrew Cuomo did over the weekend in response to New York City’s first Ebola case. First they announced that health-care workers returning from the West African countries affected by the deadly disease would be placed in quarantine for 21 days, a policy they implemented apparently without consulting the White House. The first person to be affected by this was nurse Kaci Hickox, who was detained on Friday after landing in New Jersey and described her confusing, bizarre experience dealing with the authorities in an account for the Dallas Morning News:
I am scared about how health care workers will be treated at airports when they declare that they have been fighting Ebola in West Africa. I am scared that, like me, they will arrive and see a frenzy of disorganization, fear and, most frightening, quarantine.
[…]
I sat alone in the isolation tent and thought of many colleagues who will return home to America and face the same ordeal. Will they be made to feel like criminals and prisoners?
By Sunday night, after suffering slings and arrows of deserved criticism, Cuomo and Christie were backtracking as only experienced politicians can. The New York governor said that medical workers like Hickox would be allowed to quarantine themselves in their homes and would be compensated by the government for any income they lost as a result of three weeks of house arrest, while also praising people who volunteered to help the sick and needy in West Africa for their “valor” and “compassion.”
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