Illusion of Safety

I am by no means a fear monger.  If anything, I'm a damn diehard optimist.  But the fact that a Dallas hospital exec is no apologizing in front of Congress for the errors they made in handling the first US ebola patient is alarming. To say the least.

Of course, hindsight is 20/20, but when a person walks into an ER with ebola like symptoms and admits that he had just arrived from West Africa!!!!!!!

How this happens is stupefying.

We screen - and almost grope (or so the new reports go) - little old ladies going through the airport to make sure they aren't toting bombs, yet the lack of foresight and care on the part of this Dallas hospital results in one man dead and two nurses infected . . . so far.

While reading this article, I can't help but think how before 2001, the thought of a hijacker taking a plane and flying it right into a skyscraper was almost too sensational for even fiction (though Stephen King ended his Richard Bachman novel, The Running Man, in the same fashion).  Yet, 9/11 happened, and we were all shocked.

For anyone who watched a Saints home game in the '80's and '90's, who would have ever imagined it would be the location for the homeless after New Orleans was flooded because of a hurricane. Yet, that is exactly what happened when Katrina hit and FEMA - just like this Dallas hospital - was woefully prepared.

And certainly the same kind of shock and confusion rippled through the American psyche when in 1957 our bitter rivals, the Russians, launched Sputnik into space when we thought they were hardly capable of farming their vast tracts of land and feeding their people, let alone being the first human beings to launch a man made object into orbit!

I think it's human nature to think we have an illusion of safety.  I mean how safe were the passengers on the Titanic . . . until they hit an iceberg.  How safe were the French behind their Maginot Line . . . until the Nazis went right around it!

Looking back on all of our blunders, the one positive sign is that we have the ability to learn from our mistakes.

I mean, after all, in little more than a decade after Sputnik, America was putting a man on the moon.  Of course, our government wasn't as divided by hatred for each party the way it is today.

How can we put a man on the moon in 1969 to counter the Russians puny Sputnik? Yet, is America any more secure today in 2014 than it was in 2001?  And I'm not blaming this on either of our presidents since then.  It just seems strange to me that it only took a little more time to put a man on the moon (Sputnik was in 1957 and the moon landing was in 1969, so 12 years) than it did to find and assassinate the man behind 9/11 (2001-2011).

But being the optimist I am, it's my sincere hope America (led by the millennials, who, thank God, are not like my generation, the Gen Xers, at all) can unite once again when a crisis arises and actually work together to solve it rather than blaming it on the opposing political party.

I like this story that author Steven Johnson tells about President Reagan going in for surgery after being shot in 1981.  As he was being prepped for surgery, the President looked at the doctors and joked that he hoped they were all Republicans.  The head surgeon, an ardent democrat, said something brilliant, "Mr. President, today we are all Republicans."

I hope in the name of saving US lives and preventing a pandemic in our country we can all be Democrats or Republicans in the name of securing or country and helping our citizens.