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Ebola-Shaming
We need to talk about Ebola-shaming.
It is past time someone speaks up about our insidious and malignant cultural tendency to police, judge, and condemn people who projectile-vomit a virus that might melt your internal organs; a perfectly natural virus that occurs naturally in nature and is thus natural.
We need to talk about how we make people with Ebola — especially the ones who vomit on fully-laden 747s — feel guilty, inferior, and less-than only because they deviate from traditional and orthodox health expectations and transgress accepted codes of “contagiousness.”
It’s time for us all to gain the language and context necessary to parse outdated and bigoted ideas about hemorrhagic fevers. Some examples of Ebola-shaming include:
- Insensitively approaching those who are Ebola-abled in Hazmat suits;
- Expressing unease or distaste about having the Ebola-abled as neighbors;
- Focusing on the physical traits of the Ebola-abled, such as the way they bleed from their eyeballs, rather than their professional skills and accomplishments;
- Telling people they can avoid being labeled as an “Ebola victim” by not “touching the corpses of people who died from Ebola.” (The word “victim” is not empowering, nor is the association with corpses, nor is the suggestion that becoming one is an inherently bad thing); and
- Making jokes about fruit-bats.
Using the word “infected” subtly warns the Ebola-abled that there’s a line: they can be unhealthy, but not too unhealthy. Research has shown that many Ebola-abled become depressed, anxious, and even suicidal about this; well, that’s what research would show, if researchers overcame certain challenging problems in measuring suicidality among the Ebola-empowered.
I’ve written a play, Ebol-UP! to address the damaging impact of Ebola-shaming and our Ebola-negative culture. It’s “a call to action,” so to speak, a reminder than Ebola-shaming is happening every day, everywhere. It’s inspired by the real-life experiences of the many Ebola-powered people I interviewed. I’m filmed shaking hands with them, hugging them, kissing them, and then putting my hands right in their corpses — all in a really natural, comfortable way — to show that I’m totally at ease with vomiting blood and bleeding from my eyeballs. I’m arranging for it to be shown at the 2015 New York Fringe Festival.
Ebol-UP! vividly represents the irrational, harmful, terrible way we take voice and agency away from the Ebola-abled. It is a powerful and authentic representation of our “healthiness” double-standards. I am hoping to receive a grant from the NEA to support future creative work like this. (I might be around to receive it because it’s possible I’ll be an Ebola survivor, although the word “survivor” is stigmatizing around the concept of “non-survivor,” so I prefer just to be called “a playwright.” Why is it relevant what my disease is, or as I prefer to think of it, my ease?).
I hope Ricochet members will support me in this, as they always have, and give serious consideration to the way they’ve stigmatized and other-ized the Ebola-abled people in their lives. It is well past time.
Image Credit: Shutterstock user Carlos E. Santa Maria.
Published in General
Re: mastery, the Uyghur-bus comment struck us both funny, which I think has staying power. But you may not recall that, shortly after joining Ricochet and discovering your “Menace in Europe,” I thought: Berlinski. Not a common name, but I’m sure I’ve seen it before. Perusing my shelves revealed “A Tour of the Calculus,” and the dots were connected. Then, of course, your father’s visits here; the discussion of what Gödel’s incompleteness theorems do or do not establish among Midget Faded Rattlesnake, the Berlinskis, and myself; and the Monty Hall “paradox.” All of that is, I think, sufficient to reinforce the recollection.
If not, though, I recently had occasion to blog a defense against another blog’s commentary on my presentation with Amanda Laucher at the Strange Loop conference this year. In the process, I visited the Wikipedia page for Alonzo Church. If you look at the list of his better-known students, a familiar name again appears.
I can’t seem to get away from you two!
My father was Church’s doctoral student?
I had no idea. Seriously.
Gosh, I’m behind the times. I’m still making Liberian Tanker jokes.
How about a ribbon of actual vomit?
R&L: I took Claire to be skewering the sort of “Pajama Boy” tendency to think that we can *solve* a problem by promoting a faux, facile ‘awareness’ of it; and, then, move on to the “next big thing”. Not to mention poking at the obsession with feel-good, politically-correct terms and concepts. I took from her no minimizing of the importance of containment/prevention; nor a lack of compassion toward victims and their families.
I think there should have been a trigger warning at the top of the original post. I would have appreciated knowing that “Fringe Festival” was going to be mentioned.
As was Raymond Smullyan, which I had no idea of. If I had, I’d have haunted the Philosophy department at Indiana University the way I haunted the Computer Science department in Lindley Hall, no doubt annoying Dr. Friedman and Dr. Hofstadter to no end.
In any case, it’s kind of charming that you still have things to learn about your father. :-)
Not to mention the evil plots concocted by Big Pharma and advocates of population control as mentioned in The Ebola Conspiracy Theories.
#stopebolashaming
[there…. that should put an end to it… and Yer welcome]
From the source:
“Church’s doctoral student? Not me. My supervisors were Stuart Hampshire, John Wallace, and George Pitcher. I have no idea why anyone would suppose that Church supervised my Ph.D. I did take Church’s graduate course in mathematical logic, though.”
Oddly, it seems Wikipedia is not entirely and one hundred percent accurate, all the time.
I knew that sounded odd.
That’s not funny.
I guess it depends on what the meaning of “doctoral student” is.
During the 54 years that I have lived in Los Angeles we have had massive earthquakes, riots by armed thugs, mudslides, wildfires, and other catastrophes too numerous to mention. The one thing we have never had during those 54 years was a message on the emergency broadcast system. It kind of makes you wonder what it would take for the powers that be to actually use the thing. Maybe a nuclear attack? “Residents of Los Angeles, Attention! Screeeeeee. Your city has been the site of a nuclear attack and you are all now dead. Please proceed to your local morgue in an orderly manner.”
I remember back in the 70’s someone accidentally stuck in the wrong tape during a test of the Emergency Broadcast System. One Saturday afternoon while watching TV the warning came on and said something like ” This is the Emergency Broadcast System. This is not a test. An actual emergency is in progress, tune to your Emergency Broadcast Station for further instructions”.
Since the ONLY thing they were using that for was Nuclear War, Toe to Toe with the Ruskies, needless to say I almost needed to change my pants. They quickly realized the mistake and yanked the tape. But a lot people had a very very anxious couple of minutes….
I knew you’d be able to easily resolve the mystery. :-) If you follow the link to the Mathematics Genealogy Page, you’ll also find no mention of your father. So now the mystery is: who put your father’s name in the list on the Alonzo Church page? Since it is Wikipedia, you or your father may wish to edit it in order to correct it.
Feel free to edit it if the spirit moves you (so to speak); if I take it upon myself to correct everything Wikipedia gets wrong about me, my family, or anything else, I’ll go right down the obsessive-compulsive sinkhole and never come back. Speaking of which, as his ghost, you surely remember that your living incarnation was one of the world’s best proofreaders, yes?
Indeed. He also came up with a much better Ontological Proof of God’s Existence than St. Anselm. He also found a flaw in the US Constitution that allows for the formation of a dictatorship—which he was talked out of explaining at his citizenship hearing by Albert Einstein and Oskar Morgenstern, more’s the pity.
I’m a huge fan of the man for many, many reasons.
Anyway, back to your father: OK, so he took a graduate logic class from Church. That’s still mightily impressive.
I’m honored to receive this accolade!
Freaky.
I thought I’d share this important public service announcement:
Afterwards, please return to any TV channel, to resume normal, denial-of-reality, government indoctrination. Thank you.
Or they should just change the name to “Narcissists without Borders”.
Both Dr. Spencer and this nurse seem to fit the bill:
http://www.dallasnews.com/ebola/headlines/20141025-uta-grad-isolated-at-new-jersey-hospital-as-part-of-ebola-quarantine.ece