Ebola!

And then there was one.  One case of Ebola in the US and suddenly the four horsemen have been spotted on every corner.

Not to get too dark, in what is mostly a lighthearted blog (although I do feel this topic is in line with my content goals as I like to point out the absurdities of human behavior) but death and sickness are awful, random and everywhere.  Illnesses kill, people kill, accidents happen in ways one could never possibly imagine.  For example, in an incident of almost unspeakable...irony, the owner of the Segway company died driving a Segway off a cliff (I felt the need to provide proof on this one).  If that can happen, as far as I'm concerned, nothing is off the table when it comes to the cosmic equivalent of the universe suddenly picking you to say "that's all folks."  And of course it is awful and scary to think about the fact that any of us could go at any time.  Cue the existential angst.

And along comes Ebola.  In a pantheon of killer diseases, it's the star since the plague moved off the stage.  Just its name conjures up images of a horrific death that apparently involves your organs just like melting out of your orifices.  Apparently, it also conjures up images of Outbreak, a movie that is breathtaking in its scope of scientific inaccuracies, yet for some reason serves as *the* source of contagion possibilities and, even worse, probabilities.  We freak at images that clearly, obviously, most definitely demonstrate how easy it could spread.  "Look, the people carrying the deceased ebola victims are wearing hazmat suits!"  "That nurse giving an injection is wearing gloves and a mask!"  Of course, we don't think about the fact that conversely, in the third world countries where it does spread, there are no hazmat suits, gloves, masks or quite frankly any containment or basic medical cleanliness procedures whatsoever because, basically, they are really poor and can't afford them.  That little fact would interfere with the glorious fiction of the impending epidemic that just may destroy the US population.

We in the United States love our impending pandemics.  SARS, swine flu, ebola; every single one is going to be the big one - the one that will project us into the landscape of Stephen King's The Stand, the second must know reference for US citizens' study of the disease-ridden end of life as we know it.

Day in and day out people of all ages die in tons and tons of different ways, often in seemingly unfair and (I'll use this word again) random tragedies, and understandably, this kind of stresses people out.  Then along comes comes the news (and more news and more news and more news - holy shit does it ever stop?) of a killer disease that has reared its ugly head (well, reared it in the United States - we seem to be okay with it as long as it is somewhere over, under, down there, somewhere, other than here).  And in an instant, and with an illusion of control over the universe, we swarm to capture, contain and slay that very identifiable monster. And when the end doesn't come, it's all due to our diligence, and never the fact that there really wasn't ever much of a threat at all.  Yeah us!  We kept SARs from our shores and the swine flu wasn't all that bad thanks to those expensive, specific vaccinations the pharmaceutical companies developed really quickly (the fact that swine flu, like every other version of influenza since the beginning of time was most deadly on the very old, the very young and the already sick is irrelevant, thank you very much).

Meanwhile, as we're searching for the next cause of the end of our world, boring old stuff like cardiovascular disease and car accidents are actually creeping around killing most of us. But addressing those would require things like exercise and safe driving and maybe even an eradication of McDonald's so we'll just ignore those.  Ebola is much easier, thank you very much.