THE BURNED OVER DISTRICT

Franco Ordonez, writing for McClatchy, examines the fragile state of the AMerican character in the face of the latest "crisis", Ebola. The disease may be ugly and deadly but the American reaction runs a close second.

The death of Crowl’s neighbor, Thomas Eric Duncan, the first patient identified with Ebola in the United States, set off a wave of anxiety and fear across the country and political knee-jerking that’s becoming more and more familiar in the United States...

What happened next was predictably American: The public was rocked with nightmares about spreading microscopic viruses and bioterrorism, like the scares that followed anthrax, avian flu and H1N1 swine flu. Politicians, both Republican and Democratic, sought to score political points or prove they were willing to do more than anyone else should another case arise.

Hundreds of microphone-wielding journalists and their television cameras flooded into Dallas to speak with neighbors of Duncan’s and give minute-by-minute updates of the nurses and those who’ve been quarantined. At least two students from Nigeria who applied to a small Texas college were told they wouldn’t be admitted because of Ebola.

Elsewhere, a teacher from a Maine elementary school was placed on leave after parents worried she might have been exposed to Ebola during a trip to Dallas for an educational conference. Syracuse University rescinded an invitation to a Washington Post photographer over fears about his reporting trip to Liberia. In Washington, D.C., a bus was quarantined at the Pentagon when a passenger vomited in the parking lot.

When caught unprepared in a crisis, Americans have a tendency to see things in apocalyptic terms, said Allan Lichtman, a distinguished professor of history at American University in Washington, D.C. It may not be a uniquely American trait, but it’s one that appears we’re particularly conditioned to and bound to repeat.

Consider the panic of 300 million people over 8 cases in a nation with quality healthcare to the situation of the populations in West Africa currently dealing with the outbreak.

More than 5,000 people have died across West Africa, mainly in Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea. With many cases going unreported and United Nations estimates that infections could be doubling every three to four weeks, the fears are that cases might reach into the hundreds of thousands by the end of the year.

Probably the fact that first person to bring Ebola to the US was black had nothing to do with our reaction, certainly much less than Fox News and the GOP brains trust but one fact is obvious to does who aren't buying into the scare. The only thing we are fearing is fear itself.