Ebola. Now shut up.

It all started with a picture. Well, no. That’s not quite right. It started with an aborted Facebook status that led to a picture. But, no. That’s not entirely true, either. I think it really all started the day the first caveman looked up at the stars and asked, “What’s it all about, really?” Except it came out as, “Grunk, bloof-bloof, hocktack” and ended with a sharpened mastodon tusk sticking out of his friend’s chest. Or sticking into it, as it were.

Which is where Republicans come from.

But in this particular instance, it really did all start with a Facebook status. I was thinking about the Ebolasteria that’s sweeping the nation, and came up with something along the lines of, “I’m pretty sure the Venn diagram of People Who Deny Climate Change and People Who Are Scared Of Ebola would just be one big circle.” But it wouldn’t fit into a tweet, and I didn’t feel like making a 140 character version, so I just made my own Venn diagram. Which is here:

Science, yo.

Jim Wright (of the fantastic Stonekettle Station) picked it up and shared it, and then it shot around the world in as close an approximation of something “going viral” as anything I’ll create probably ever will. So that was nice.

And yeah, I know it’s a shitty Venn diagram. The point is the joke, not the technical accuracy of it. Don’t read too much into it. Or do. That’s your business. What the hell do I care?

But getting back to the Eboliolia for a minute, please stop being stupid. I saw a post from a friend today about how a lab tech who “might” have handled specimens from PATIENT ZERO (if I was a news anchor, those two words would’ve flown onto the screen in extruded 3D letters along with scary music and some sort of impressive swooshy sound just now) is currently quarantined on a Carnival cruise ship and OMG! OUTBREAK! THIS IS HOW EASY IT IS TO SPREAD IT TO THE PUBLIC AND THEN IT WILL GROW EXPONENTIALLY AND WE’RE ALL GONNA DIE!

Look at that Mickey Mouse virus. Notice how Disney hasn’t sued Ebola over copyright? OMG! FOLLOW THE MONEY! CONSPIRACY!

Except that it hasn’t “spread to the public”. At all. This person is someone who might have handled the specimens, so yeah. Not the public. Also, he or she handled them 19 days ago and is showing no symptoms of Ebola or any other signs of any illness at all. Because, you know, it is possible to handle dangerous biological material and not get infected by it. It’s something people (doctors) in the business (medicine) call “a Tuesday”.

Because Ebola, while plenty scary if you get it, isn’t actually all that easy to get. It’s certainly not as easy to get as the flu that hundreds of thousands of people won’t bother getting vaccinated for, even though plenty of Tea Party wackadoo sites will tell you that Ebola is airborne and if someone sneezes in the next county, el niño (remember him?) could blow the expelled particulates directly into your own nose holes and then it’s all over, and it’s been fun and thanks for all the laughs.

But here’s the thing. If you want everyone who treats Ebola patients to be quarantined for a month after having anything to do with an Ebola patient, then what you want is to run out of doctors and nurses and lab technicians pretty damn fast. Either they won’t want to get anywhere near a patient for fear of being quarantined, or they’ll jump in and help and then get benched for the next month while not treating far more people with far more contagious diseases (who will then go on and infect a whole bunch more people who also won’t get treated because all the doctors are just chillin’ in the Quarantine Lounge).

I see a lot of parallels between Ebola and the early days of AIDS. It’s scary and deadly and I heard that you can get it if you share a Coke with someone who shared a needle with someone who shook hands with a guy who went to the same gym as my cousin’s best friend’s neighbor who has it. WE ARE ALL GONNA DIE.

Except we aren’t. And, much like HIV and AIDS, you’re not going to get Ebola from your neighbor just because he happens to cough in his front yard while you’re out getting the morning paper that you don’t subscribe to but that those bastards keep throwing onto your driveway anyway for no good damn reason at all. If you’re in direct contact with someone infected, then sure. Your chances go up…if they sneeze/cough/bleed into an open wound or directly into any of your face holes. (Or deposit any of their bodily fluids into any of your other holes. Whichever. I’m not judging.)

Which is a lot like how AIDS worked and still works. And, just like the early days of HIV, people are pretty sure you can get it all sorts of ways that THEY don’t want you to know about. Whoever the hell THEY are, anyway. Probably something to do with the Trilateral Illuminati Benghazi Bilderberg Brotherhood. I heard they run things.

The simple truth is, the real world isn’t an episode of Walking Dead. It’s not even a game of Pandemic. You’re not going to wake up tomorrow to find that all of Arkansas* has been infected (although who would really even care).

*Feel free to replace Arkansas with the crappy state of your choice. Texas is a good one, except that I live in Texas, so I’d rather not wake up dead, thankyouverymuch.

IF there’s an outbreak, it won’t happen overnight. It will happen slowly, and spread the fastest through the most closed systems, because that’s how viruses work. If you lock a bunch of people into a confined space and then don’t let them out when one of them gets sick, then they’re all getting sick. (Except for the one person who is strangely immune and who becomes humanity’s last, best hope for a cure. It’ll probably a farm boy or something. Raised by foster parents. Born under mysterious circumstances. Keep an eye out.)

You know, kind of like how a lot of people want to see us wall up Liberia and let them all die. Which is exactly what people who suggest closing off the country want, even though they won’t come out and say it.

And it’s what they want with anyone who gets Ebola here. Or who treats someone with Ebola. Or lives with someone who treated Ebola. Or knows someone who lives with someone who treated Ebola. Because people are scared and people are stupid.

So don’t be stupid, ok? Please? Just this once?

See the game for what it is: midterm politics. Ebola is just the latest football being kicked around by the opposing teams, and everyone who thinks it matters (in the way the media and pundits are telling you it matters) are exactly the sorts of jellyheaded morons they need votes from. Because the thinking people aren’t cheering and jeering in the stadium.

We don’t care that you think Obama is soft on Ebola, or that you’re angry that he’s being too aggressive with getting it under control. (Which opposing idea the Conservatives will be mad about at any given point depends on whenever Obama does exactly what they said they wanted him to do before he did it, of course.)

We don’t care that you want to play politics and rile up your functionally illiterate bases. We really don’t. It’s just what you do. You’ve always done it, and you’ll keep on doing it long after we’ve all forgotten about Ebola and moved on to the next big thing.

But for pete’s sake, can the regular people please just shut up about it? Maybe people have always been this reactionary and dumb, and it’s just that social media outlets have given their voices more volume than just being the crazy uncle at the Thanksgiving dinner table who rants about the gubment and taxes and whatever. But that doesn’t make it any less annoying.

YOU ARE (probably) NOT GOING TO GET EBOLA.

Do you know how I know that? Because the Swine Flu didn’t kill you, did it? (Remember when that was going to be the end of civilization?) Because you didn’t get AIDS from shaking hands with a gay guy once, did you? (Well, unless he stabbed you with one of those HIV joy buzzers Pat Robertson goes on about…) So what do you think your chances of getting Ebola are? Honestly.

Will there be more cases? Sure. It’s almost guaranteed at this point. We may end up with literally DOZENS of people who contract it. But will there be a major, apocalyptic outbreak? Probably not.

Which is actually something a lot of these crazies want, I think. They’re fascinated by the End Of Days. They’ve been telling us Obama is the Anti-Christ for years, but they’re running out of time waiting for him to destroy the world. So when something like Ebola comes along, well…cross your fingers, kids. This might be the one!

Sigh.

UPDATE: But wait! There’s more. And it just gets worse from here. Way down here in America’s armpit, we’ve ratcheted the crazy up to eleven, thanks to the ever-lovin’, swivel-eyed lunatic Joe Deshotel. This lovely man – a state representative and “businessman” by trade – has decided to embrace that most sacred and time-honored tradition of Not In My Back Yard, and is working with the state to ensure that anyone who might be diagnosed with Ebola in southeast Texas won’t be treated in southeast Texas. Instead, at the moment of diagnosis, the unfortunate patient will be whisked away to an undisclosed location while all of his or her “home furnishings” are burned at the Veolia company’s incinerator in nearby Port Arthur. This is what you get on the other side of the equals sign when you add Stupidity to Hysteria and multiply by Pandering, kids.

(To its (dis)credit, Louisiana refused to mix the burned remains into the steamy étouffée of one of its landfills, what with the fear of infection from incinerated ash being so powerful and all. So Joe’s not the only idiot who has gone NIMBY crazy.)

12 News KBMT and K-JAC. News, Weather and Sports for SE Texas

So, just to put this into perspective, if you get Ebola in southeast Texas, you will be separated from your family, removed to an undisclosed location and everything you own will be burned to ash. Way to encourage people to self-report there, Texas!

I can tell you one thing right now, as a parent. If my kid even shows so much as a sniffle this year, I’m going to get him to cough directly into my face as often as possible. Because there’s no way in hell he’s being stashed into a closet somewhere I can’t get to, in the highly unlikely event that he – *insert superstitious warding phrase/motion/etc… of your choice here* – should come down with Ebola. (Of course, they’d likely quarantine the entire family, while isolating the diagnosed patient. But that doesn’t really make it any better.)

Or how about this? I could give the authorities a call and say that my creepy rapevan neighbor has been showing symptoms of Ebola, and could someone come take him away and burn his house down, please and thank you? In the interests of the public good, of course, and nothing at all to do with how obnoxious he is whenever he’s zooming up and down the road with all 350 of his fleshy pounds flapping in the breeze on a kid’s dirtbike at 6am on a Sunday morning. And the less said about the goat, the better.

Come on, people. This is insanity. First, we’re penalizing doctors and nurses and lab technicians for coming anywhere near Ebola. Now, we’re disincentivizing even going to the doctor if you feel sick. Why risk a possible Ebola diagnosis and be removed from your family while you lose your job for not reporting to work as everything in your house gets burned to ash in a damned incinerator in Port Freaking Arthur, TX?

There are a lot of bad ways to go out in this world, but having any part of it happen in Port Arthur is an indignity no one should have to face.

Not ever.

Look, kids. It’s really pretty simple. So far, there have been 8 confirmed cases here in the good ol’ US of A. Yeah, you read that right. Eight. (This is including people who were infected abroad, but have been or are being treated here, in the United States.)

To put that into perspective, more people from having sex every year. A lot more people. Like, around 49,902 more. I’m no statistician, but I think that means you’re roughly 1.21 gigawatts more likely to die from doing the humpty hump than you are from ever even catching Ebola, much less dying from it.

Here, let me use a few statistics that I trotted out during the OMG SWINE FLU FREAKOUT from a couple of years ago. I’m sure the data has changed a little, but probably not enough for a lazy bastard like me to worry about correcting. Just go with it.

ODDS OF DYING BY…

• Car Accident – 1 in 6,500
• Murder – 1 in 16,500
• Drowning – 1 in 88,000
• Deadly Asteroid – 1 in 200,000
• Airplane Crash – 1 in 400,000
• Swine Flu – 1 in 4,747, 260
• Lightning – 1 in 6,200,000
• Ebola – 1 in shut up and I can’t even deal with your paranoid shit right now

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NOTE:  I know times are hard and yeah, I need to make a living too, but if you want to read any of my books but can't afford to buy them right now, hit me up.

I'll take care of it.

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