For all the ways we are the same, as a collective we've discerned 1001 differences. Between different groups, between the individual and the group. And we have created a separate language to describe these differences.
Unfortunately, we live in a generation that is finding it's foundation in homogenizing spoken and written language. While there have probably been more words added to the dictionary in the last decade than the rest of the century, many of these words are transient -- produced by a contemporary trend in dance, technology, or celebrity tweet. Words that will make the next generation of tweens cringe.
So now when we talk of important things, we confront a challenge. How do we communicate to this generation without diluting the significance of difference?
... Say you go into any store, Walmart, Target, or supermarket, you'll find containers. Bags, tupperware, crockery, etc. etc. And guaranteed, you will find a dozen or more things that can hold up to and exactly 16oz. But while the volume is the same, they're not all shaped the same, they're not the same brand, some have better lids than others, and they might not even share a purpose. You wouldn't use a ziplock freezer bag to bring a hot coffee to drink on the way to work, and you wouldn't use a coffee mug to pack your toiletries for travel. If some transparent omnipotent entity created humanity in its image, so thus have we in the container industry.
For all the wrong things that can happen when we focus on our differences, there are reasons why we have to talk about them. Simply - if we don't talk about them, we don't remind ourselves of what an individual is, was, or could be. In this case, what we don't know won't bring bliss. In the history of our differences, the final straw was always who said what or didn't and who did or didn't first.
We knew about the Holocaust. We knew about the internment camps in North America. Meanwhile, the right people in the right place said nothing, the right/wrong in the wrong/right place respectively weren't heard, and the wrong people in the wrong place were lucky if they didn't die. But just about everyone knew. They knew because it was their parents, their children, their brothers, their sisters, their neighbors, their friends. They were people who had faces and names that were unique in significance to the individual.
This moment, I can tell you who some of my neighbors are by name, but would likely only maybe recognize them if they were on my street. And the only reason I'm afforded that much is because my family has been in this house since I was 5 and those neighbors have either been in my house in my lifetime, or lived in their house for 70% of the time I've been in mine.
I can talk about what's happening in Israel, Ukraine, and that tempestuous strip of water between China and Japan -- but the people who are living it don't have names, or unique faces, and while they're extremely well photographed and on the internet with a greater presence than I will ever have, because I wear big black glasses and the same clothes I wore 15 years ago... for what little I might have to say about any of those things, my voice is instantaneously diluted by my fashion sense and my Y-generation musical preferences.
But I acknowledge, that I am in part to blame. Because I recognize the difference between then and now. I appreciate that I can't talk the same way now that I did then... not just because the words are different. Because I am different, and because the world has changed and it didn't request my permission to do so.
So when someone says, "Ebola is like AIDS" -- I recognize why they might say that. I understand that if you stood the same distance then from the epidemic as you do now, it would appear the same. If this someone were like me, and easily discounted, that would be different. Simply, while it's not fair that what I say counts less, the fact is - it does.
Alternatively, when someone who is a publicly recognized authority of health and safety says it, I recognize that there is a difference than if I or someone like me said it. There are no cameras pointed at me, so my responsibility to articulate and pontificate and present fact is construed as less.
Let's take another example, for instance, how Ebola is NOT like AIDS. Fact. They are separate categories of infectious disease. They are both communicable but their transmission is different. Their treatment is not comparable, because one of the two has barely broken out of trials.
Even if you clarify "this X epidemic is like that Y epidemic," you're still only saying "a poppy seed bagel and an everything bagel are both bagels."
I would like to place enough faith in the education system in North America that there isn't anybody with a high school diploma in 2014 who should feel they can say this without addendum or further clarification, least of all the director of the CDC. And I'm sure he does, at length, as we would hope he wouldn't casually make such a blanket statement without considering the social media ramifications.
In the here and now, however, most people don't have to look past the headline, before it is reblogged, retweeted, and goes viral and reaches every screen. So you'd think he, as an educated individual living in the present day, he would be aware that if he says anything remotely sounding "A is like B" in a sound byte that there is the real possibility that it could be repeated as "A is B", even when that is not the truth.
Kind of like the regal pairing of "Kimye" - are they splitting, are they divorced, is she pregnant again, who knows, who cares, but everyone will hear about it anyway.
And everyone may not have the motivation, and in some cases - education, to discern the subtleties between A, B, fact, or conjecture.
Now, I get it. He's saying the fear is the same, the rising concern in health services and security communities is the same as it was. I'm hoping he's indicating that because there is, at some level, a epidemic precedent, that the right people are in the right place, or getting there faster. But I get it.
Bearing in mind, I was born in the early 80s, have two degrees, with a concentration in social sciences, and lead the (now less than average) middle class lifestyle, so saying "I get it" because it's widely "gettable."
In container-speak: I am the mug that can carry hot coffee from the counter to the table, but I am not the ziploc bag that can get your hand sanitizer through airport security to carry to your next destination.
Similarly, my neighbor could be a mug, or a ziploc. Or a stainless steel water bottle. Or a microwaveable tupperware. Or an exceptionally ambitious baby bottle.
Whatever his/her name/face is, he/she may not "get it". But they have it -- on their phones, and computer screens -- they can read the headlines that quickly switched from "Ebola is an epidemic spread from Africa", "Ebola is here", to "Ebola is the new AIDS". While there are a lot of dots between those two statements, not everyone is going to care enough to look for them.
This wouldn't make you a bad person, at least, so far as I'm concerned. It just means you have other things that you care about more, and it's one of the differences between people that's worthy of recognition.
(Translation: I get that you can't hold hot coffee, and that's okay because there's a lot of things I can't or won't do, too.)
But, this does mean, you are like most people, myself included, who are more vulnerable to misinformation about the things that aren't your priority.
So when someone, let's call him "the director of the CDC" says something rather glib about something rather epi(demi)c, and that becomes a viral headline, you're as susceptible to being misled as anyone else.
When really, it could be ultimately avoided if those people in authority, like the DotCDC, could, I dunno, appreciate how they are different than everyone else when they communicate, particularly to mass media, because what authority comes with is the greater capacity to be that right person and the right time who has the opportunity that others do not to be able to say something people will hear. But they are human, too, and they can be swept away by this millenial homogeny in language and the streamlining of mass media, and they forget.
So this is my small way, my tiny medium to post a reminder:
While someone may always be listening, they mightn't always care. So when you can grab their ear, try to make it count. The opportunity is rare, fleeting, and is perilous to be undone.
