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Migrant Crisis and Wuhan Flu?
Last week, my husband and I attended a family party in New York. Joking about “social distance,” family members did refrain from hugging as enthusiastically as we might ordinarily have done, and the cousin who had just returned from Milan was mock-shunned and chided for not informing us of his travels before he had intruded into the new, six-foot diameter personal space bubble we’d been told we should maintain around ourselves.
My husband and I got home from New York just as the cancellation cascade commenced and things began to look less ha-ha and more serious. Family e-mails have been arriving daily, offering health updates; one family member has a slight fever, everyone else seems okay, wash your hands, wash your hands, wash your hands. Had we known then (that is, two weeks ago) what we know now, the party might have been canceled altogether. Certainly, my Milan-visiting cousin would’ve been politely un-invited, or offered the option of virtual attendance via Skype. After all, the focus of the party was my aunt’s 85th birthday. She’s hale and hearty, but … she’s 85.
In other words, my fairly well-fed and generally healthy American family has responded to the Wuhan pandemic by (admittedly retroactively and imaginatively) agreeing to exclude a beloved family member from our midst.
This makes me wonder how the pandemic is going to affect European and American attitudes toward immigrants.
After all, whatever fantasies Joe Biden and Ayanna Pressley offer us, xenophobia is the age-old response to a novel virus for a reason: human beings are what moves a human-threatening virus from one place to another. If my cousin had indeed picked up a little Wuhan in Milan, separating him from my aunt (mask, wall, a dozen city-blocks, or a continent) would keep her safe.
And so, with Wuhan, the No-Walls-No-Borders crowd have been presented with one of the entirely predictable problems associated with the untrammeled movement of people around the planet. Along with our charming cultures and vibrant diversity, we humans carry diseases with us wherever we go, including some nasty ones.
For years, I’ve found myself pointing out the obvious to well-educated but apparently incurably romantic friends that Europeans aren’t storming barbed-wire barricades to enter Turkey en route to Iraq or Sudan, any more than Americans in search of free education have been setting off for Cuba on makeshift rafts ever since El Jefe took power. The direction of travel is always the same — away from violence, poverty and oppression and toward safety, a decent standard of living, and (relative) freedom. And, I would argue, migrants are moving toward America and Europe and away from countries with less sanitation, less immunization, less-than-adequate public health systems. Therefore, both refugees and economic migrants are not only more likely to have pre-existing health problems and thus to be a burden on the healthcare systems of the country that offers them refuge, but are also relatively likely to be carriers of illnesses both old (typhoid, whooping cough, measles, bubonic plague, tuberculosis) and new (woo-hoo Wuhan!)
Iran, to name one example, is overwhelmed with Wuhan; their people are dying in sufficient numbers as to be interred in mass graves. Because Iran is a horrible place to live, Iranians have been among the refugees swarming toward Europe’s border.
How quickly would the virus spread from one infected migrant to the rest in circumstances like those pictured below?
So what effect will this pandemic have on European and American views of immigration? How quickly will fear of contagion curdle the milk of human kindness in European veins, or harden the hearts of those American sanctuary city-dwellers? When immigration doesn’t pose an abstract existential threat to Europeans but a very concrete one, will the old blandishments of Mutti Merkel and Co. (“We can do this!”) come to be seen as a betrayal? Will genuine xenophobes ride the Wuhan express to power? What do you think, dear Ricochetti?
Published in Healthcare, Immigration
Which is a rational response rather than a phobic one.
Extending that suspicion and distancing to Chinese Australians, for eg, is not a rational response. Though it is an instinctive one.
Xenophobes don’t work against human instinct, they work with it.
Also, I don’t think xenophobes act in bad faith. They are genuine in their beliefs and would call them common sense. Amirite?
I’m not sure that the word “xenophobe” is adequately defined. Like “racist” and “sexist,” it is used so indiscriminately that it has lost much of its former usefulness. Americans in general are not xenophobic. They are, however, as prone to behave irrationally (e.g. panic-purchase toilet paper) in response to a threat as anyone else.
What is often astonishing is how willing people are to brush aside threats, including genuine ones. I was telling a friend today that she—being over seventy—should stop bringing her multiple-use bags to the supermarket, and insist on single-use plastic. The former are incredibly germy, and thus a danger (in these Wuhan Times) not only to herself but to other supermarket patrons.
Despite having been among those who rushed out to buy up all the toilet paper available, and filling her cupboards with soup, vinyl gloves, face masks and cough drops; despite agreeing with the cancelation of all her normal activities and being glued to the news, she refuses to even consider reverting to those horrible, polluting, bird-gagging, whale-choking single-use plastic grocery bags for the duration.
People are bonkers.
I’ve been pondering this. (You know, ponderously.)
And in fact the thing about gay men as a cohort is true – and I think it’s true for most communicable diseases.
But I also think that responding by calling it ‘The Gay Plague’ is part of the reason why 24% of new diagnoses in the US are of heterosexuals.
It may have been instinctive, but it didn’t turn out to be smart.
Without G-d sex takes on a religious meaning. People don’t want to part with their G-d. Ross Doughat talks about this pretty well.
Without religion man makes his own religion. And man is far too corrupt for that to work out well.
I’m sure that there were Native-Americans telling other Native-Americans not to worry about the settlers coming.
Someday this may end up as a Quote of the Day.
Dude…according to the page you linked to, new HIV diagnoses among gay and bisexual men remain “stable” —meaning it isn’t decreasing—-and remains around 70% of the total.
If anything, calling it “The Gay Plague” might help the young blades —the cohort most at risk—recognize that, contrary to how it tends to be depicted (if at all) on t.v., AIDS isn’t mostly about IV drug users and prostitutes but remains, overwhelmingly, a threat to gay and bisexual men.
I’m old enough to remember when AIDS was identified in the late ’80s, and even then, people were bending over backwards to avoid associating it too closely with homosexual men. The poster child—literally—was that little boy who got it from a blood transfusion, and then there was a young woman whose case was well-publicized; she supposedly got it from her dentist.
I remember, because when I went to a new dentist, I had to fill out a form that asked me whether I had any reason to believe I’d been exposed to the AIDS virus…and asked the dentist, rather pointedly, that given that the only known case of patient-dentist infection had ended in the death of the former, was there by any chance anything in his medical or sexual history he should be disclosing to me?
I got a pretty funny reaction, now that I think of it. Lots of spluttering interspersed with long mnemonic pauses during which he was obviously picturing those long-ago and now regretted dental school bacchanals….
Where was I? Oh yes—I’m not sure it caused more mischief to call AIDS ‘the Gay Plague” (which, by the way, was how gays themselves described it) than it would have to call it the “Housewives and Hemophiliacs Disease” or “The Totally Inexplicable Killer of Random Persons.”
Please forgive my puerile juvenilia. I mean no offense. I am just very immature.
I lived in America from 1983 to 1993, and I really remember that quite differently. I guess how one sees or experiences things depends on where one sits in life?
I do remember those innocent victims being given more airtime.
Clearly it didn’t. For a number of reasons.
But my point was that heterosexual infections – which I think are counted separately from IV drug user infections? Perhaps they’re talking about vector? – could have been much lower. Which is something we all should want, right?
Code name: Duchess. I feel it was apt on a number of levels.
I was in college (for the first time) in the early 80’s. AIDS was identified as a sexually transmitted disease. No one thought heterosexuals were immune from the disease. It was a big concern.
But, humans are notoriously bad at assessing risk, and some drives aren’t overcome by it anyway. The rationale for promiscuous sex among heterosexuals went something like: AIDS is new and it started with gay men, so it probably hasn’t spread widely in the heterosexual community (not totally irrational) and, besides, I could be hit by a truck while crossing the street tomorrow (slightly more irrational).
Yes—-could and should.
“Where one sits” meaning whether one is, oneself, gay? Perhaps, although having many gay loved ones who were and apparently remain at risk, and being a long-time supporter of gay and lesbian rights, I wouldn’t count myself as among those inclined to overlook bigotry, of which there definitely was plenty. But not, in general, among the liberal anointed who, as I (and the late Randy Shilts) would maintain, were far more inclined to seek reasons to avoid the obvious connections for what turned out to be a lethal length of time. This wasn’t only out of tender concern for the feelings of homosexual men; it was also because the sexual revolution was supposed to have removed all the barriers to “natural” human sexual expression, and we were all going to be gloriously free to do whatever to whomever with whichever…
I vividly recall living in New York in 1980-82, when the West Village Scene was in full and explicit swing: it was something to behold. No worries about pregnancy, and Shilts describes men picking each other up while waiting in line at the gonorrhea clinic; antibiotics could handle any microbial downside! While, a few years hence, a smugly shocked heterosexual might put him/herself at some risk by imagining that the newly identified illness was a punishment soley targeted for sodomites by God Himself (though strangely sparing exclusive lesbians), his risk would’ve been dwarfed by that incurred by a homosexual male still doggedly cruising West Fourth Street. And, by the way, given that this was thirty years ago, I find it disheartening (if not, sadly, particularly mysterious) that ANY gay and bisexual men (who are not drug users and therefore, in practical terms, mentally ill) are still getting AIDS.
It’s interesting to watch how people guard their sacred cows in the midst of Wuhan. A single mom friend who is adamant that the U.S. is on the verge of an Italian-level melt-down was fretting to me about bringing her children into the Dollar Store because of the risk of germs. Her youngest, especially, has a tendency to both touch and (weird, but he’s little) lick stuff; we’re talking not just plastic wiffleball bats and displays of St. Patrick’s Day tchotchkes; he’ll casually rest his tongue on the check out counter itself. “He’s always done this,” she explained. “He sucks his hair too.” We pondered ways to prevent this behavior—a cowboy bandanna? duct tape?
I suggested that perhaps it was time for her son—who boasts suckable tresses to rival Rapunzel—to get a Big Boy Haircut?
Instantly, the wall goes up: “He doesn’t want a haircut.”
“So?” I said. “If you’re talking about taping his mouth shut so he can’t lick the store clerk’s hands, I don’t see why cutting his hair is a step too far?”
I think that for her, the sons with long hair are an identity marker. Maybe sort of like the Muslims who’ve been licking the walls of their mosque to demonstrate their confidence in Allah’s antibiotic properties; This Is Who We Are. With Identity there can be no compromise.
More along the lines of I will never experience and perceive crowds of men as you do, because you’re a woman and I am not.
However sympathetic to your position I am, I will notice different things about that crowd, and that’s what I’ll remember. Because I am not you.
Doesn’t mean either of us perceives the whole truth, rather that neither of us does. To misappropriate Erica Jong (unreadable!), we all, every one of us, inexorably bring our own zips.
(Like your friend with the long haired son, or the Iranians licking mosque walls [wot???!!] – thank God the Saudis [really?] look like they’re on the brink of cancelling the Haj.)
I will say that, from memory, ‘the liberals’ didn’t set health policy back then. It was the Right, for good or for ill.
Me too!! It was a glorious time to be alive, not least because I had hair!!!!! (On my head.)
And I didn’t have (noticeable) hair on my face! Those were the days.
Interesting. I think it took awhile for “health policy” to be involved in any national way— to begin with, it was local and regional. If I had to guess, I’d say it was more like 1987 before the federal government here got openly and loudly involved. But I could be wrong—I have to peg all national events to which baby I was nursing at the time, and babies—if you have a lot of them—can get muddled up.