As I was flipping through other Academites’ blogs today, I came upon Jordan’s here and thought I would respond to her most recent post about fear and Ebola.
As Jordan said, ebola is definitely a force to be feared. In fact, the fear of Ebola itself should be feared. Anxiety, if powerful enough, can trick the brain into thinking the body has a certain disease, mimicking the symptoms. This concept, called somatization, becomes a vicious cycle. I remember reading The Cobra Event by Richard Preston in sixth grade and not being able to get through the first two chapters because it scared me so much I thought I was getting brainpox. And that’s me, safe as can be in the USA. I can’t even imagine how terrified I would be if Ebola were a real possibility here. Or how petrified a Sierra Leonean family must be as Ebola spreads all over their town.
So if Ebola is a grave topic, why are Americans being so insensitive? People have been dressing up as plague doctors and other tasteless costumes for years, yet dressing up as cancer or AIDS is a total no-no. So then why are people dressing up as sexy ebola nurses? Plague doctors are more of a historical throwback; large numbers of people haven't been dying from the plague for centuries. But ebola is, for some people, a threat probably more urgent than cancer or AIDS, so why do people joke?
A plague doctor
As far as I’m concerned, one of the top reasons for the insensitivity is denial. Since ebola isn’t likely to reach us here in America (outside of some isolated cases), we can essentially act like it’s not really our concern. Ebola is spreading over there, in Africa, not here. It won’t happen to us.
But then, I’m also reminded of the phrase, “you have to laugh so you don’t cry.” Dark humor, or gallows humor, as offensive as it might be, is in many ways a coping mechanism. So maybe that sexy ebola nurse is a little bit nervous, deep down, about a disease that makes its victims hemorrhage from multiple orifices. So perhaps in one way or another all of us are responding to fear.
