Monday, October 6, 2014

The Scariest Thing About Ebola

◼ What's more alarming than the disease is what the crisis says about our lack of trust in U.S. institutions and leaders. - Ron Fournier/National Journal

...Steadily, over the past four decades, the nation has lost faith in virtually every American institution: banks, schools, colleges, charities, unions, police departments, organized religion, big businesses, small businesses and, of course, politics and government. A Pew Research Center survey in October 2013 found trust in government at a near-record low. While specific federal agencies received generally high marks (including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention), Americans continued to lose faith in the presidency, Congress, and the two major parties.


In short, the United States faces crises of leadership and trust. Which, to me, is the scariest thing about the Ebola outbreak. I'm far less worried about the disease striking me or my loved ones than I am about what this incident says about the nation's ability to survive a true cataclysm. Whether the next existential event is Ebola or ISIS or any of the countless 21st-century horrors, we are only as strong as our institutions—and our trust in them....

Trust. There's that word again. How much faith can the public summon toward an administration that used incompetence as a defense in scandals involving the IRS, Benghazi, and Obamacare; that lied about its surveillance of Americans; and that just recently acknowledged dangerous misjudgments regarding the Secret Service and ISIS?

...Ebola is a serious threat, but it's not the disease that scares me. What scares me is that fact that we can't trust the institutions that are supposed to deal with such threats, and we can't trust the men or women who lead them. Which means they can't help us.







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