Ebola: A plague whose time has come?

 Burying plague victims in the Middle Ages (Wiki Commons)

There's no doubt about it; ebola is scarier than the bird flu of a few years back. It's more deadly, for one thing, with up to half (or more) of all those who catch it dying from it. And it's horrific both in the way it shuts down bodies as well as causing hemorrhages everyplace one can think of. It is, not to be too bold about it, a plague.


Plagues change societies, and it's apparent to all but the top one percent of western society that, at the moment, we are in great need of substantial change.

A history lesson

In medieval times, the plague put paid to the feudal society, in which a great many were owned by a very few, and those few not owned were systematically starved to death by the owners of the others. In his book The Time Traveller's Guide to Medieval England, historian and all-round good guy Ian Mortimer makes it clear that feudal times ended when the plague had dramatically reduced the population of able-bodied people to work for little or for free for the lords of the manor. All of a sudden, if the swells wanted work done, they had to actually pay for it. And possibly say please and thank you as well. Mortimer makes it clear that he thinks modern society would never have happened but for the Black Plague. Work was suddenly a valuable commodity; workers' value rose and rose for the next several hundred years.


Fast forward to now.


The Koch brothers, a pair of ignorant, fundamentalist bean bags full of turds and air, have bought the United States lock, stock and barrel...except for what the Walton family, owners of WalMart own. In both cases, their stated aim is to keep amassing money for themselves, and possibly a few bought-and-paid-for friends (such as the Republican Party), while those who labor at making money for them are paid not enough to live on and must therefore beg from the "free men" to make ends meet. That is, after working a 40-hour week, Koch and WalMart workers must depend on food stamps and other government benefits to live. Government benefits, lest you forget, equals money derived from the paychecks of those few--and getting fewer--who do earn enough to both pay taxes and live.


The Koch brothers and WalMart are, in fact, a big drain on the rest of us. They keep virtually all the money their slaves, that is employees, make for them AND they soak the rest of us.


How long can this continue? Apparently indefinitely because their handmaidens, Reagan, Bush and Bush, so destroyed US infrastructure, education and public confidence that any dissent  by those being harvested by the wealthy has been ineffective.

The Grim Reaper reappears

But then along comes a plague. Halloo, hallay, one might say, except that we would be celebrating our own death, most of us, so the few might live better, as happened in medieval times.


We know all too well how horrific an ebola death is, and we don't want to die. Neither did the poor of the middle ages suffering bubonic plague, but they had no choice in the matter. Indeed, sufferers were sealed into their houses with their families and dogs and cats...and the rats and fleas that had given them the disease in the first place. When everyone was dead--or those few who recovered or didn't get it were allowed to emerge--the house was burned to the ground. Since they didn't know then that rats and their fleas carried the germ--and the rats could get out of a burning house, especially a rickety medieval peasant's house--they didn't see fit to kill the rats as well, and so even this draconian maneuver didn't stop the spread of plague.


Will ebola travel from nation to nation as the Black Death did? that plague was carried by rats jumping ship in ports, but also by human contact. It is thought ebola is endemic in some populations of African bats. These are unlikely to hitch rides on airplanes and cross oceans, like rats. Clearly, humans can get it from other humans.


The developed nations did little or nothing to stop the spread of ebola within Africa when it first appeared, or to find an effective treatment for it when it was killing only Africans. One might call that Developed Nation Chauvinism, or just plain racism, and one would be right.


I'm not inclined toward wagering, and indeed, in this instance, I would give no more than 50-50 odds that the west is mobilized to protect itself. On the one hand, the Koch brothers and the Waltons might realize they are not immune to ebola, although--insulated from the hoi polloi as they are and able to afford keeping apart--they may have some functional protection. If they realize they, too, could die, perhaps they will contribute to finding a treatment and/or preventing spread. Bill Gates has already done so. But notice, he is not classed with the modern robber barons, Koches and Waltons. As far as I know, people employed by Microsoft make decent wages, as well.


Or will their greed, the Koches' and Walton's, prevent them from helping to end the ebola plague because, a) they don't want to spend any of their money, or, b) they think the peasants are useless and need to die, or both. Indeed, one gormless Republican lackey of their kind has already suggested locking ebola sufferers in together until they die. He was born almost a thousand years too late.


The only silver lining, for those of us who might manage to survive a full-out ebola plague, would be quite medieval. It would be the sudden ability to charge and get paid decently for services currently given away almost free because the Koches and Waltons and other selfish, greedy ignoramuses rule the world.


Cold  comfort.

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If you'd like to read all of what Ian Mortimer has to say about the Middle Ages, and be both entertained and informed, click below and buy his wonderful book. (The first image is for US readers, the second for UK readers.)

Organ Farms

As a society, I think it’s time we decided which is more important to us, EACH individual’s freedom of choice, or salving our own consciences for having the temerity to be alive and heaping mindless activity, activity meant to involve others in our personal angst, onto our fear of death.

This morning, I got a request on Facebook to sign a petition asking that organ donation be an “opt out” procedure in the UK. In short, should this petition succeed in convincing government to do this, in order not to have your organs harvested when you die, you would have to exert yourself to make sure you had opted out.

Government and bureaucracy being what it is, you would also be well advised to keep checking that your opt out decision, if that’s your choice, remained on the books, in force, and available for those who would otherwise slice and dice you upon your demise.

That is, quite frankly, ludicrous. If a person wants to donate organs upon death, an “opt in” decision gives them control over their body. It is likely that those to whom organ donation was important would have apprised their friends and relatives of that fact, as well as filling in the appropriate documents. With every hospital already looking for donor organs, it is unlikely in the extreme that a request to donate would go unheeded.

Stopping the harvest would conceivably be much more difficult than starting it, especially after a society had got used to opening up the dead and passing the still-viable tissues on to others without a moment’s hesitation, which would be the case after donation had become virtually universal. It would be incumbent upon those few who had determined not to donate to move heaven and earth to ensure their wishes were honoured. Note: The word “donation” is used here and by those offering the petition. If an activity is required by government, then it is not a donation. It is a mandate. Simply put, the petition seeks to mandate that all UK residents give up their organs after death whether they want to or not. The idea of a donation has jumped headfirst out the window. But I digress.

By now, many are asking who wouldn’t want to donate organs, to give another a chance at life? That’s what the Organ Donor Nazis usually come up with.

The simple answer is this: It doesn’t matter who that would be. Whether there are millions of non-donors, or just one, the principle is the same, and it regards who has the right to sovereignty over each person’s body. I know for sure who I want in charge of mine, and that person bears my name. It is not the nation in which I live. It is not people who have known people who needed transplants. It is not even my husband. At the moment, I have no intention whatever of becoming a body parts factory. At the moment, all I have to do to ensure that I don’t “donate” (see above) is precisely nothing.

I lost a client over organ donation once. We were having lunch and, that very week, it had become possible in Tennessee, where we lived, to add organ donation to one’s driving licence. She said, “I assume you’ve done yours,” and she had assumed wrong.

But any form of Nazi who believes their way is the only way is likely to ask questions in a way that assumes you have complied with THEIR wishes, because if you don’t THERE WILL BE CONSEQUENCES: “You have eliminated all the Chewish people from your company, ja?”

I’ve never been good at giving Nazis the answer they want. I told her I had not chosen to donate my organs. She persisted. “Well, you’ll do it next week.” No, I would not, I said.

Well, that tore it up. She never hired my work again. (To be honest, I’ve lost more than one client over holding beliefs with which they disagreed. I lost a really good client because of my dislike of George W. Bush….whose organs I wouldn’t insert into a dying monkey lest it become too stupid to live with those genes inside it.)

I might change my mind about organ donation some day. But I won’t if I am forced to; I’ll dig in my heels and ensure that the only person who has control over my physical body is the only person who has control over my mind, me.

Indeed, should this horrific movement achieve its goal, I will very probably begin a movement to get it overturned. We have very little freedom left in western nations these days, but paramount among those things the greedy bankers and politicians have left to us is self-determination. By making our body the body of others by fiat, even that is taken away.

Which leaves us control over our own minds. Yes, that is in some ways more important than control over one’s body, especially one’s dead body. But that body was allocated to house a specific mind; frankly, I cannot separate mind and body. I doubt those whose heads have been severed from their bodies by ISIL recently would disagree with me. Sure, they had control of their minds because no one could force them to think any way they didn’t want to (except for the torture aspect, which changes that). But they had no control over what happened to their body. ISIL wanted to harvest their heads for its own purposes. As an organization run amok, ISIL did exactly that without sanction.

And it is gruesome. There is probably nothing more gruesome than that in human conduct. Because it is not only final, but it is how we know—we ALL know—that the person whose head is being severed in conscious of it even while it happens and is powerless to stop it. AND it is the end of that person. Remove the head and, before fingerprinting and DNA, one couldn’t even have determined for sure what person it was. The ultimate dehumanization. Gruesome. Without exception.

Some people’s understanding of their selfhood, their sovereignty, extends beyond their head, and it extends beyond their death. It is not for another to mandate or legislate that. Women have control of their bodies: men are not permitted to invade them when they like; they must be invited. Indeed, for a man to have intercourse with a woman after her death is regarded as both illegal and uncommonly low in western society, because it is still her body. And she did not give permission to invade it.

I rest my case.

Personal problems and the body politic

Naturally, as so much these days, the petition to change organ donation to Opt Out arose because one person had a period of stress waiting for organ donation for a loved one. Life does not come with guarantees. When we are born, we are subject to ALL the possibilities inherent in human life. That includes illness. It includes uncertainty. What it doesn’t include is the right to impose one’s own terrors, distress, sadness and other woes on others. Period. It is, frankly, aggressive to attempt to do so. Aggression is not always carried out with guns; sometimes, it is carried out with manipulation of human emotions, as it is here, with the story of the little girl who needed an organ (who actually got it, by the way, meaning that her illness is very little more than an excuse for her mother to attempt to impose her belief in organ donation on others). Worse, if one refuses to kowtow to the demand to cry and beat one’s breast immediately over the current Issue du Jour, one is branded a philistine, war-monger, people-hater or rat.

The petition says, “If a citizen feels strongly enough, he or she could simply remove himself from the database.” I won’t point out that herself apparently cannot be removed, because this is not a grammar lesson, but rather an ethics lesson. I will point out that the obvious rejoinder is, “If a citizen feels strongly enough, he or she could simply add himself or herself to the database.
Clear?