Kort Explores conundrums of the human condition

Nuclear war has been our favorite fear for the last 50 years, but a far greater threat to the survival of the human species has been with us far longer. Pestilence has always been the grim reaper's favorite tool. War puts on a more impressive show, but has so far been almost insignificant in terms of long term population reduction.

When recounting tales of death and destruction, popular history focuses on battlefield casualties and events like the holocaust. But the victims of Hitler's death camps were only 10% of the over 60 million who died during the years of WWII. Even during "hot" wars, both soldiers and civilians are more at risk to disease than bullets. Only 10% of the dead Japanese soldiers on Guadalcanal died from bullets.

War and pestilence are allies of convenience because war creates the ideal conditions for disease by disrupting sanitary systems, degrading nutrition, and forcing unfamiliar populations into close contact. When one considers the overall costs of human conflict, war becomes more a precursor and enabling factor to the larger effects of pestilence than an independent phenomenon.

But while war nearly always invites its unholy associate pestilence to the dance of death, pestilence has repeatedly proven it doesn't need war to wreck its terrible mischief on humanity. Most of the great epidemics that changed the course of human history owned their terrible toll more to the mobility of infected individuals than the efforts of great armies.

In the perversity of our liberal dominated politically correct times, all forms of self defense are subject to attack and demonization in the press and by our malignant "justice system". The rights of burglars exceed the rights of the lawful citizens they seek to violate and despoil. A multiple murderer goes free while the cops are put on trial. A gang of black subway muggers can successfully sue their victim for millions when injured by the self defense efforts of their intended victim. And all of the attention is on further restraining victims from effective self defense.

Not very long ago, infectious individuals were isolated from the main population in leper colonies, tuberculosis sanitariums, etc. The current liberal rewrite of history treats these desperate efforts to contain epidemics as gross violations of the rights of the infected. In liberal dominated America, it's no longer even possible to remove carriers of proven infectious killers like the new drug resistant strains of tuberculosis from the general public.

Consider the reaction of the liberal news media to the initial suggestions that AIDS infected individuals take extra precautions to guard against spreading the disease - at least until the potential for contagion was determined. In past plagues, resentful infected individuals intentionally tried to inflict their disease on the more fortunate. The living were forced to create the concept of quarantine to defend themselves from the dying.

While most AIDS sufferers make a good faith effort to contain their infection, some AIDS carriers have been convicted of intentionally infecting others - sometimes by rape. But the courts consistently uphold the rights of the infected to conceal their disease from their potential victims. The rights of the infected are consistently held to be superior to those of the uninfected. The rights of innocent victims are only considered after they have been wrongfully doomed to a terrible death.

During a recent Ebola outbreak, the Zaire government was desperate to keep the deadly virus from spreading - desperate enough to shoot anyone trying to escape from the containment area. What terrified the Zaireans was the possibility of the virus spreading to the capital, from where it could easily spread around the globe. Perhaps even more disturbing is that the same doomsday cult that staged nerve gas attacks on Japanese subway passengers sent cultists to Zaire to collect samples of the Ebola virus for use in future attacks. But the focus of the liberal press coverage was not on the potential threat to the entire human species, but rather on attempting to vilify the Zaire government for human rights violations in restricting the free movement of potential Ebola carriers.

Fortunately for the rest of us, the Zaireans were much less "civilized" and far more rational than our liberal news media, and were willing to do whatever was necessary to contain the Ebola epidemic - this time. But the Zaireans took a lot of gratuitous abuse from the liberal media which instead of hailing them as heros who saved us all from a horrible death, attempted to cast them as cold hearted villains. Let's hope that next time those on the front line don't respond to our liberal media's outrageous manipulation of the news by allowing the killer virus to escape containment and establish itself in our liberal politically correct over populated megacities.