An old adage suggests that if you can’t say something nice about someone, then you shouldn’t say anything at all. Given the quality of our public discourse these days, a new adage looms: if you can’t say something informed about a topic, then by all means get online and share your delusions with the like-minded.
By my count, there are at least two topics people hereabouts are getting overly exercised about for no good reason, and that’s Alabama football and ebola virus.
I can understand the hooraw about the Tide. Football has been played at the Capstone since 1892, and no doubt when the team lost its first game, there were a dozen letters to the editor of The Tuscaloosa Daily Pine-Borer calling for the resignation of Coach E.B. Beaumont for failing to recruit successfully against the flying wedge.
To the insensible fan’s dismay, Alabama will not win every game every year. The sensible fan understands, as did a coach named Bryant, that losing a game builds character. “It’s awfully important to win with humility. It’s also important to lose,” he said. “I hate to lose worse than anyone, but if you never lose you won’t know how to act. If you lose with humility, then you can come back.”
The insensible fan is quick to explain what went wrong, based on the wealth of experience he has gleaned from his grasp of a TV remote. Often, the insensible fan can draw a direct line from the losing score to the coaching staff, heedless of the fact that not a single coach ever plays a single down on the field. When mistakes are made, it is generally by the fallible but earnest young men who play on either side of the ball.
Some insensible fans have tried to make something of the way Coach Saban looked during the Ole Miss game, by turns weary or harried or frustrated, depending upon their unerring interpretive gifts. The sensible fan, seeking an image to take from the loss, will regard neither the expressions of the coach nor disconsolate players at game’s end. The picture of the game is of Kenyan Drake, the fleet running back whose leg was broken so awfully that even Joe Theismann flinched. As he was being wheeled out of Vaught-Hemingway Stadium, in obvious pain, the junior pulled himself up to give fans the high sign.
It was the instinctive response of one who trains to be a winner and who is undaunted by adversity. Kenyan Drake won’t be back this season, but you can bet he’ll be trying to. By the same token, you will look in vain for signs of surrender around the Crimson Tide practice field. That coach named Bryant also said this: “Losing doesn’t make me want to quit. It makes me want to fight that much harder.”
Ebola is a far more serious topic than football, but you might not know that to read the hysterical prose or watch the alarmist fantasies passing for news coverage of the epidemic. Clearly one of the symptoms of contracting the deadly virus is a mounting sense of panic about contracting the deadly virus, for which a simple remedy is to turn off cable news.
The ebola virus is a rough piece of biology, certainly. It’s been a concern for world health providers for almost 40 years, first diagnosed in Sudan in 1976. What makes the malady so attention-getting is its deadliness; there is no cure for the virus and it kills 50 percent to 90 percent of patients who catch it.
Along with sparking the imagination of screenplay writers, ebola has become a scary specter in political discourse. Much as a virus mutates, the perception of ebola has changed from a plague infecting deepest, darkest Africa to a new front in terrorism, marching boldly across our under-defended borders to take residence in our neighborhoods. Erstwhile Dr. Rand Paul has characterized ebola as “incredibly transmissible,” even though the only way to catch it is by touching the bodily fluids of someone who already has ebola.
The only way ebola can be transmitted through the air is if a guy with ebola gets on a plane and flies from Liberia to Texas, which is just what happened the other week. Though certain politicians prefer to blame President Obama for the oversight, it was actually medicos at a Dallas hospital who didn’t seem to find alarming the fact that a sick man recently arrived from West Africa was manifesting symptoms of ebola virus in their emergency room.
There have been demands for banning or restricting travel between West Africa and the U.S., in the grand tradition of American xenophobia, but as Dr. Tom Frieden, the director of the Centers for Disease Control, explained to The New Yorker, that would make it harder for aid workers we send there to get back out, which would “enable the disease to spread more widely there and ultimately potentially spread more to other countries in Africa and become more of a risk to us here.”
Containment. That’s a strategy not many people here like to discuss, because it means getting involved with a part of the world most people would rather ignore. Liberia is Africa’s oldest republic, founded by freed slaves in 1822 with a capital, Monrovia, named after America’s fifth President. Now, though, it’s just another impoverished sub-Saharan nation, trying to rebuild after years of civil war and corrupt governing. On top of poverty and civic malfeasance, Liberia also has ebola with which to contend.
So far, about 7,100 people in West Africa have contracted the virus. Dr. Frieden indicates it’s possible to have zero risk here. “We can only do that by making sure that we get it under control in Africa,” he said. “We’re beginning to see the response ramping up there. But it’s going to be a long, hard fight.”