Panicking

10/18/2014

Thanks in part to the constant 24/7 news reporting, the public is on high alert for signs of Ebola.  And, as it happened yesterday in Washington, there was concern that a woman vomited in a parking lot near the Pentagon after being briefly on a shuttle bus.  Oh my gosh, did doctors and officials really have to assume that she might be infected?  She could have been pregnant, had the flu or suffering from a hangover, but no the worst case scenario was imagined.  

Twenty-two people on that Pentagon shuttle bus were kept quarantined for hours.  Talk about having a bad day - for those passengers - as well as the sick woman.  Marines were sent to the woman's office where the woman's boss was questioned.  Apparently the woman was suffering from a severe illness.  

I feel bad for the people who were unlucky enough to have been on that bus.  I also feel sorry for the sick woman.  When she became ill, I'm pretty sure she didn't realize what a knee jerk action that would cause.  If, the woman in question, had been out of the country, and/or Africa in particular, then the officials reaction would be reasonable and justified.

I'm not trying to down play how serious this illness is, because I know it's both serious and dangerous.  But sometimes I feel we're running around like that little chicken that used to cry out "the sky is falling".  

I believe that the talking heads help(?) to keep the general public in a state of mild frenzy.  Back in the "old" days, we didn't have 24/7 news reporting, the internet or social media.  The newspaper arrived once a day, sometimes twice if you lived in a big city and what you read was the news.  Of course when big things did happen, like JFK's assassination, reporters like Cronkite were on the television and regularly scheduled shows were canceled.  But even big news events didn't have entire shows dedicated to people who were "in the know". 

Another form of panicking is weather.  In the parts of the country where it snows, the reporters can go on for hours to tell us that the storm is coming which they repeat every 15 minutes or so.  They remind us, because after all we are just "normal" folks with "normal type" brains, that we need to rush out and rape the stores of the basic snow essentials: milk, bread and toilet paper.  

Trust me when I tell you that you do not, I repeat do not, want to be in a grocery store the day before a big weather event is predicted to happen.  The lines at the cash registers are long, and heaven helps us if you get to the milk aisle, for instance, and there is little or no milk!  

Sometimes I think all of us could benefit from a Zen moment.

P