My son got in the car after school the other day and said that a friend didn’t feel well during class, told the teacher, got sent to the nurse and went home. But the friend’s sudden illness was not the full story: “Then the teacher got sick and went home, just a little while later. You know what that means, right?” He paused dramatically so that I could consider the implications. “They have Ebola!”
Needless to say, neither the friend nor the teacher has Ebola. He was making a joke, albeit in rather poor taste. But as is always the case with jokes, a thin current of anxiety ran just below the surface: could he or someone he knows contract the disease? Are we safe?
My son has developed into a fairly regular newspaper reader – The National and The New York Times are his staples – and we’ve had some interesting discussions comparing the way the UAE and US papers cover the same events. Reading the news, however, has given him the idea that danger lurks at every turn, and I am reminded of A Day in the Life by The Beatles, which begins “I read the news today, oh boy”, and continues with a description of a man blowing his brains out in a car.
I suppose you could say that people have been bemoaning the state of the world from the moment there was a world to bemoan: writings from early civilisations are full of doom and gloom. Violence and disease have always been a threat, and while the names may change, human behaviour in the face of these threats seems to remain fairly constant.
But it does seem, doesn’t it, that the world feels particularly precarious these days. If you believe the news outlets in the US, Ebola is going to kill us all, and if not Ebola then ISIL, and if not ISIL then some natural disaster caused by climate change. Cataclysm looms in every direction. Given the endless litany of bad news, I sometimes wish that my son would forego the newspapers and stick to reading about Minecraft.
In response to the news, I want to offer my children assurances that we’re safe, nothing will happen here and it will all be OK. But increasingly those reassurances are being trumped by the “what ifs” creeping into my thoughts: what if religious extremists claim even more territory? What if someone with Ebola finds her way into a crowded metropolis like Delhi or Manhattan? What if the next big hurricane hits even harder?
Just this week, for instance, the US embassy reported that anonymous threats had been made against American teachers and schools in the UAE. Overnight, my campus sprouted additional security guards and checkpoints, and even my children’s school, which is not American, sent out a letter detailing their security measures. Even without this recent ramping up of security, however, no one who lives in the UAE needs to look very far afield to see places where people aren’t safe, where violence has become part of the daily diet, where things are absolutely not OK. Can any of us say – regardless of where we live – that “it can’t happen here”, given the impossibly long list of what “it” might be?
How not to be paranoid in an age of paranoia? When there are more talking heads on CNN opining about the dangers of Ebola than there are people in the US with the disease, as happened a few weeks ago, can we be anything other than terrified? The health crisis in West Africa won’t be solved by hysteria: that crisis, like all the others confronting the world, needs global attention, discussion and coordinated care. Outside of telenovelas and soap operas, hysteria has never been the solution for anything.
I suppose some would say that we could just wrap ourselves in cocoons of blissful obliviousness and let the world fall apart without us, but I’m not sure that’s the answer either. Somewhere between paranoia and wilful ignorance there must be a point – probably slightly different for all of us – from which we can engage constructively with the world’s problems without collapsing under their weight. I’m not sure I’ve found that balancing point, but I’m trying. That’s the balance I’m hoping my children will find, eventually.
In the meantime, you’ll be glad to know that both my son’s friend and the teacher were back in school the next day. Not Ebola: a cold.
Deborah Lindsay Williams is a professor of literature at NYU Abu Dhabi. Her novel The Time Locket (written as Deborah Quinn) is now available on Amazon
