Hark, how the peoples surge and sigh,
And laughters fail, and greetings die.
Statisticians assure us that the world’s getting safer. Crime is down, wars less frequent, diets healthier. But why are we so fearful?
Mark Twain liked to say there are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics. This is particularly true in America, where our political system, fueled by an irresponsible media, pours out all three of those like a BP oil rig in the Gulf. Healthcare, gun control, Social Security — everything becomes politicized and terrifying: Death panels! Murder! Bankruptcy! We live life in italics, with exclamation points.
Let’s take the two most recent terrors, ebola and ISIS. Although only one person, Thomas Eric Duncan — a Liberian — has died here from ebola, our country seems gripped by fear, as politicians seek to blame Obama for letting it run amok over our borders. Suddenly this grisly disease is in our midst, and we’re panting like the trapped party-goers in “The Masque of the Red Death,” as if “Darkness and Decay and the Red Death held illimitable dominion over all.”
Here in town, USF St. Pete canceled a visit by 12 African journalists — none even from ebola–infected countries — who were here, ironically, as part of the Edward R. Murrow Visiting Journalists’ program. Standing up against Senator Joe McCarthy, Murrow famously said, “No one can terrify a whole nation unless we are all his accomplices.” He would have applauded a neighbor of ours, who promptly held a laughter-filled dinner party for all of the visiting journalists.
ISIS is the other crisis. Like ebola, they’re a true scourge, but they’re not about to overrun America, either. ISIS (the “Islamic State”) is a hyper-inflated splinter group blending a reactionary religion with medieval violence and slick videos to recruit unhappy youngsters to inflict brutal damage in Iraq and Syria. They use certain mosques, along with Facebook and other media ads, to appeal to uneducated young men (and a few young women) who feel lost and inadequate amid Western society’s freedoms and excesses.
We should turn down the noise blaring from our radios and TV sets. ISIS and ebola are real threats, but we have worse ones: climate change, drug wars, watered-down education, street crime, cancer, poverty, the NRA. ISIS and ebola are real, but they’re not threats to America. Let’s just deal with them, and work on the true problems facing us.
When I was a boy in Brooklyn attending the Lutheran Church, our minister once read to us from Revelations about the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. On their vivid horses — white, red, black, and pale — they represented war, famine, and death; and they were galloping after us.
Now, that was scary!
. . . And such are we—
Unreasoning, sanguine, visionary—
That I can hope
Health, love, friends, scope
In full for thee; can dream thou’lt find
Joys seldom yet attained by humankind!
—Both quotes from “To An Unborn Pauper Child,” by Thomas Hardy (1840-1928)