One would think that now that the midterm elections are over we would have respite from the use of fear politics, but I expect that this will not be the case. Politicians always seem to have a need to tear down their opponents and using fear is a favorite tactic of conservatives. So now that the Ebola scare has faded a bit from the public consciousness, the politicians will have to find another boggy man they can use to frighten the American people doing their wishes.

Several days ago the last of the original American Ebola patients being treated in the United States walked out of the hospital, his doctors proclaiming him cured. Since the treatment of an unfortunate Liberian citizen was botched by a Dallas hospital, every other Ebola patient cared for in United States has survived. People in the general public are starting to realize that Ebola is not the usually fatal disease they were led to believe, at least not when it is treated in modern healthcare facilities. In addition despite all of the media clamor, not one person out of hundreds who had casual contact with those Ebola patients before they were diagnosed has contracted the disease. Sooner or later the general public will come to the understanding that it is not easy to contract the disease unless you are caring for very sick patients and that an Ebola epidemic will not soon be unleashed on our country.

With two prominent governors still licking their wounds after taking on a nurse who had only scientific facts to use as weapons, I don’t think that any other politicians are going to rush to again use Ebola to try to scare the American people. Maybe now we can concentrate of winning the fight to eliminate the threat of the virus in Africa which is what we should have been doing on all along. So what will the politicians try to scare us with next? Maybe they will concentrate on convincing us that ISIS is working with the Mexican drug cartels to smuggle terrorists over our Mexican border.

The real question is why are we so willing to offer to give up our rights and those of others, which we inherited from generations of Americans who paid for those rights with their lives, every time we are confronted with some kind of domestic threat? Are we going to continue to be so spineless that we can be manipulated by politicians into surrendering those rights voluntarily for just a bit more safety? How can we in good conscious continue to ask our young men and women in the military to fight and die for us if we are such cowards?

Cajun 11/16/14