Ebola…Coming soon to a Place near You

The market’s up. Unemployment is down. Banks are lending. Oil is cheap. The party’s getting better. But then you hear a disturbance outside. Suddenly, Wham! The door explodes. And there it stands, looking straight at you: Ebola, grinning like death. The music stops.

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Another viral intruder has invaded our borders, revealing the underbelly of indecision on the issue of illegal immigration. Too late for isolation and quarantine. The enemy is now among us.

Yes, it’s been a frightening year, 2014. The world’s flirting with disaster. The Russians and the Chinese are squeezing us like a fat piece of fried bologna layered between slices of white bread. Burkas and keffiyehs are now fashion statements. Confusion reigns. The only thing we can really count on is Jimmy Carter’s immortality.

The Ebola contagion creeps through the cracks of our porous shores. It rides on the breath of Sierra Leone refugees. It oozes from the lips of Liberian escapees. Nobody’s safe. French kissing is deadly.

Newscasts report people wailing and fleeing their homes, running wildly into the streets in mass hysteria. Hyperbole is a media extravaganza. Even the ACLU, not to be outdone, is digging up litigants for a class action law suit against the Washington Management Team. After all, quarantine in Ebola tent colonies in the parking lots of Walmart is cruel and unusual punishment. Not to mention shopping there.

There is a bright side. The Ebola epidemic, unlike Duck Dynasty, has so far only affected a few. New Jersey has been quick to respond. They’ve given up waiting on the CDC to remove its head from the proverbial bureaucratic morass.

New Jersey is a magnet for disasters ever since Tony Soprano arrived, RIP. God has been trying for years without success to reduce Atlantic City to the ocean floor. Sandy didn’t do the job. Trump tried, but soon abandoned his avaricious icon and slinked back to Manhattan. Now Ebola is taking a shot at it. It may parallel Bruce Springsteen’s music for nuclear fallout.

New Jersey’s problems began with the Grover’s Mill township incident on Halloween, October 30, 1938. Remember when the Martians landed their spaceship there? Orson Welles narrated the invasion live on the radio…War of the Worlds. Some aliens intermarried and still reside there. Prominent among them are the New Jersey Housewives. Most have been banished and live on Miami Beach. The remaining Martians fled, unable to perfect the phonetic Jersey nasal dialect.

Gov. Chris wasted no time in doling out confinements for persons suspected of being contaminated. Unfortunately, the size of the dilemma was of greater girth than the Governor. Most everyone in the state is suspected of being toxic to some degree. It offers a clue as to why nobody admits being from Newark.

Some pestilences leave stigmas. Ebola is fast surpassing measles for social isolation. Who hasn’t had measles? Remember the ridicule of classmates when, at about age twelve, you showed up with red bumps on your face? Ostracism from PE class lives in infamy to this day.

Isolation follows young children around like a bad odor. After measles, the mumps attack. Mumps, as you know, can cause sterility among males. The horror of such a stigma is the leading cause of ADHD in young boys.

Schools, like politics, breed germs. The contagion of Pediculushumanuscapitis, commonly known as head lice, is a disgusting malady. Stabbing the crawly creatures with sharp toothpicks is neither fun nor an effective remedy. Shampoo laced with kerosene does the job efficiently. Social suspicion lingers long after the quarantine is lifted.

While poison ivy is not terminal, it ranks right up there with athlete’s foot for public itching and social ostracism. Walking around with a plaster of calamine lotion does little to elevate one’s standing in the community.

My brother coveted his athlete’s foot. His pastime was to put a sock between his toes and rub it viciously back and forth until his toes became flames of fire. His grin of relief remains a fungus on the family name.

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Humor aside, Ebola, like any terminal disease, is not a laughing matter. Hope for cure abides. Longfellow wrote: “…Defeat may be victory in disguise. The lowest ebb is the turn of the tide.”

Ebola is now among us…let’s hope this week’s election returns won’t portend another landing of the Martians!

Bud Hearn
November 7, 2014