Not Like in the Movies

 A deadly disease spreads from Africa to the United States. The Centers for Disease Control and the military swoop in and take complete charge of the situation to protect the homeland. Teams of folks in hazmat suits descend from helicopters. Active carriers of the disease are immediately isolated behind plastic sheets. It’s all buttoned down neatly, seemingly within a few minutes.

But despite its reputation, Ebola doesn’t make for a good movie monster. First of all, it’s not airborne; it requires transmission by bodily fluids. Second, it doesn’t show up right away, it takes several weeks before symptoms appear. And third, when they do, it’s almost impossible at first to distinguish the disease from the flu – no instant horrible disfigurement. And the CDC, the crack federal agency that we assume will run the show, doesn’t really have that authority, at least automatically. In reality, that’s left up to local government and health officials -- and mistakes are made.

We wonder: Should we be afraid? The news outlets have learned that if fear doesn’t motivate us to stay glued to the TV or whatever screen we spend the most time with, then outrage is a good substitute. When the Ebola carrier from Liberia showed up in the U.S., the Texas hospital screwed up and sent him back out into the community. The family members who were hosting him were quarantined, but not immediately removed from the crowded apartment building where they lived, and left to deal with contaminated bedding the carrier had used. The system basically collapsed.

Not very satisfying, movie-plot-wise. But life is like that. The villains among us are too subtle. Rescuers move ineptly, or get there too late. And because we’re conditioned to look for big villains, we miss the smaller or slower ones. The enterovirus has spread through many states, only fractionally as fatal as Ebola, but equally baffling. Measles and other childhood diseases are rampant again, it’s said, because many educated, affluent parents in some places are distrustful of vaccinations for their children. But where’s the high drama, or the instant fright? Then, in another sphere, there’s climate change. The scientists keep moving up the date when catastrophe is supposed to occur. Hollywood even took a whack at it (”The Day After Tomorrow”) But it just doesn’t happen that way. These kinds of catastrophes occur bit by bit, and like the frog in the slowly boiling water, we don’t react until it’s too late, or almost too late.

And we have to cut ourselves a little slack. Human beings don’t always behave like movie heroes. Balls get dropped. Whizbang technology fails. It’s always tempting to point fingers and make heads roll, but can’t we simply focus on not making the same mistakes again? The best practices and the solutions to problems sometimes take a long time to develop, and the mistakes happen to teach them to us.

It’s really the smaller and slower stuff we should be sweating: the stuff that creeps up on us. The stuff that doesn’t appear and disappear in two hours, like in the movies.