Posted on 10/07/2014 9:03:18 AM PDT by Kaslin
The Ebola virus is not a threat, but ISIS is. That's what some of our leaders tell us. Should we believe them? Do they have a track record for truth-telling that would lend them credibility.
ISIS hasn't (yet) invaded America, but Ebola has. We are bombing ISIS in Syria, but treating Ebola here as an interloper that can be controlled. There is nothing to worry about. No need to panic. Pay no attention to the disease behind the curtain. Experts are in charge and we must always trust our experts. Do you? I sure don't.
Sometimes it seems the priority of our elected officials and experts is self-protection rather than the protection of the public, which they are supposed to serve. We only know what they tell us. We presume they have access to accurate information, but we only get their version of the truth.
Government officials testify before congressional committees and either deny responsibility for their own incompetence and malfeasance, blame others, hide behind the all-purpose "mistakes were made," or take the Fifth. A few accept "responsibility," but only in rare cases does anyone lose their job, unless their transgressions are so glaring they can't be ignored, like Julia Pierson, former director of the Secret Service. If politicians and bureaucrats protected us the way they protect themselves, there would be no need to fear Ebola, ISIS or anything else.
In the case of Ebola, our leaders want us to remain unconcerned. They have it under control, they say. And yet infected people keep popping up. Not to worry, they say. We can trust West African nations to examine those leaving their countries, even though it appears we can't. Thomas Eric Duncan managed to get out of Liberia and travel to the U.S. with relative ease.
The dumbest analysis so far came recently on CNN. Appearing on "Anderson Cooper 360," Ebola "expert" (there's that word again) David Quammen argued against quarantines and banning flights from West Africa where thousands have died from Ebola and thousands more are infected.
Here's Quammen: "You can't isolate neighborhoods, you can't isolate nations. It doesn't work ... how dare we turn our backs on Liberia given the fact that this is a country that was founded in the 1820s, 1830s because of American slavery. We have a responsibility to stay connected to them and help them see this through."
We are "staying connected." The Obama administration may send 4,000 troops to Liberia and American health workers are on the ground there.
Public health should not be held hostage to any other consideration. The practice of quarantine -- separating the sick from the healthy -- goes back as far as the year 549 A.D. when, in the midst of an outbreak of bubonic plague, the Byzantine emperor Justinian enacted a law meant to isolate sick people from regions infested with plague. I'm sure leaders back then told the public not to worry, that they had everything under control. Did people trust their leaders then any more than we trust our leaders today? I doubt it.
Failure to tell the truth about a whole range of things has contributed to public distrust, even cynicism, about government.
Take for instance the latest unemployment figures spun by the Obama administration. We are told a 5.9 percent unemployment rate and the addition of 248,000 nonfarm payroll jobs last month proves the economic recovery continues. Left out of most news coverage is a labor force participation rate of 62.7 percent, the lowest it has been since the 1970s and down from 66.1 percent in January 2004, according to Labor Department figures.
Former ABC News anchor Ted Koppel once said: "Our society finds truth too strong a medicine to digest undiluted. In its purest form, truth is not a polite tap on the shoulder. It is a howling reproach."
Our leaders underestimate the ability and desire of the public to respond to the truth with sober minds. We can handle the truth, if our government will only tell it to us.
Both would be a much lesser threat if we secured our borders and stopped importing ISIS and Ebola.
The Senate should be declared the new Ellis Island,
and each member of the Congress should be required
to take these “children” to THEIR home.
It would certainly make the American people safer.
I've got to disagree with old Cal here.
If you know someone's lying to you, you go to your own resources, conduct your own analysis, and use that as the information on which you make decisions. The PC crowd might yell at you for not using 'official' numbers, but when know their numbers are lies, why would you not trust you own rational abilities instead? It would be insanity to trust known lies.
And it would be defeatism to just throw up your hands and say, "if they'd only tell us the truth."
I agree. Most Americans can’t handle jack shiite these days, after all look who they re-elected.
The admin doesn’t have a strategy for either.
Sometimes I wonder why smart Americans even bother with government numbers. We already know they’re liars.
For example, just look at congress exempting themselves from obamacare. If a person can’t see that that is the proverbial handwriting on the wall, then there’s no hope for them anyway.
Government, politicians, bureaucrats, government agency or hired “experts” have no credibility.
It’s funny (weird). The CDC routinely gives information on infectious disease and ways to prevent it, and people pretty much ignore it. Now, suddenly, when Ebola is involved, the CDC engages in its typical risk communication behavior, and every pundit in the country accuses the CDC of lying or covering up “the truth” (although pundits can’t say what this “truth” is).
If it weren’t for this outbreak being so much in the news, the risk messages about Ebola would be ignored just like every other risk message. How many people routinely read the CDC website, which is filled with similar risk communication and mitigation advice? I’m guessing not many, because the CDC even tried to make disaster preparation fun by warning of a zombie invasion, and most people are completely unaware of that.
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