“Ah Horatio, do our fears of the Ebola virus smother whatever virtues we once had.
“ Love thy neighbor” dismissed and “dissed” by the sound and fury in neighboring Staten Island, the virus’s venomous rattle snake cobra poison, pitching neighbor against neighbor.
III
Ideals giving way to the fear of dying, the gang lynching andfear of the unknown. The calm voice of Henry Fonda pleading to the crowd.. Not able to shake the Staten Island natives in their erupting hostility toward the imported Liberians from West Africa ages ago.
Atrocities and indifference bereft the 20th century norm: Yellow badges laid the foundation for emasculating Love thy neighbor .The soulful nature of a “Doctor Zhivago”fear of being branded an outsider by the majority …. power to snake bite the “love thy neighbor” into an apparition of the Magna Carte…..Marie Antoinette’s “If they want bread, let them eat cake”
IV
Here on Staten Island, the once proud importation of Liberians from West Africa gives rise to panic and fear, the majority taunting the minority. Bullying and teasing the former natives of Liberia, a nation modeled on the values and Democratic virtues of our own Republic.
Capacious fear of the unknown permeates the network, doesn’t it? Survival of the fittest taunts the virus, whether it exists in the in the quarantined protocols, the patient’s fever is the staging area for the Emergency rooms across Staten Island’s teaching hospital or Bellevue across the Verrazano Narrows Bridge into the Big Apple.
V
For all the talk of protocols and the good sense, the capricious virtue still has the snake bite to undermine Love thy neighbor. The strength of character, its profound “maintain” in face of abdicating flesh and body.
All Staten Islanders are vulnerable. But to label fears of the natives against their original neighbors from West Africa is to compound the virus’s deadliness, the human’s survival , the origin being across two oceans and land a Continent asunder.
VI
The imported neighbors don not have to justify their existence. The Salem, Massachusetts witch hunt trial, the defendantwearing her guilt on her sleeve, is not a farfetched as Arthur Miller’s “Crucible”, yet is seems to be a mirror image of the Staten Island majority, maligning the Liberians.
Surely the virus isn’t the poison ivy of our East Flatbush origins. The blood transfusions when no penicillin was lacking in I the emergency rooms of that time, the fated protocol in these days of the Staten Island “Tempest”
“Hold back the dawn, Horatio”
October 17, 2014 The City that never sleeps.
