During the Salem With Trials, if the town’s citizens concluded that a loss, illness or death had been caused by witchcraft, the accuser entered a complaint against the alleged witch with the local magistrates, and the accused witch was arrested and imprisoned. Sometimes the witches were hung or pressed to death, sometimes they froze, starved to death or perished in prison, a few were acquitted. Rebecca Towne Nurse was hung as a witch after she was accused by a young girl of making her ill. During her trial Nurse, a respected elder in the town’s church, was accused of selfishness and arrogance by denying her guilt and speaking out against her accusers.
The trials are often cited as one of America’s most notorious cases of mass hysteria, and are often used by teachers, writers and philosophers as a tragic and cautionary tale about the dangers of isolationism, religious extremism, the abandonment of science, false accusation and the failure of due process. This idea of the Salem Witch trials as a warning – the trials are forgotten or unknown to the vast majority of Americans – have not halted mass hysteria, isolationism, or the spread of false information. You can see them all every day on cable news, and in the media and political discussions of Ebola.
Many Americans have been persecuted in somewhat the same way as the witches – Native-Americans in massacres, African-Americans slaughtered in riots, the Japanese-Americans in World War II, people with Aids, Communists in Hollywood and politics, and now, people with Ebola and those who are trying to treat them. There is not one cautionary tale, there are many, these hysterias seem part of human nature, they recur and recur. Very few Americans want to hear about any of them, or come to terms with their implications for us.
America has changed, and Cotton Mather doesn’t ride around on his horse with a Bible. Our trials are held on cable news channels and social media, in the Twitter and Facebook feeds of feckless politicians, the mobs do not even have to leave their living rooms to feed their anger and spread their false information, panic, fear and isolationism. The people who try to help people are labeled arrogant, ruthless and dangerous, the people who do not help anyone are their accusers, the self-proclaimed true victims, the armchair scientists, doctors and judges.
In 1693, a brave politician, Governor William Phips put an end to the Salem Trials. “When I put an end to the Court, there were at least fifty persons in prison in great misery by reason of the extreme cold and their poverty, most of them having only spectre evidence against them…The stop put to the first method of proceedings hath dissipated the black cloud that threatened this Province with destruction.”
“Black cloud” is the right term for the Witch Trials, and for the Ebola panic as well.
In 2014, our governors do not challenge the mob, they join the mob, ignoring the doctors and scientists, rushing to join the call to lock up the nurses and doctors who try and help the people in Africa. They have embraced a new rational for promoting hysteria and ignorance, one echoed in different words but for the same purpose by Cotton Mather (he said if the witches were accused, it was God’s will and they must be guilty and dangerous, the safety of the community depended on their death). This was Mather’s version of “an abundance of caution.”
Philosophers and historians of the future will feast long and hard at the idea that Kaci Hickox is selfish and arrogant. And what is it that makes her selfish, she has harmed no one, and happily submitted to the reasonable restrictions imposed on her. While her fellow students went on vacation, she went to Sierra Leone to help people stricken with the disease.
She saw many of them die. None of the people attacking her have been anywhere near Africa, have done little or nothing but sit at their computers and hurl nasty messages at Hickox, who is not ill, has no symptoms of the disease, and is planning to go back to Africa as soon as she can.
Around her, people clamor for travel bans, spread ignorant and hysterical information about the disease and suggest the good people fighting it are dangerous and irresponsible.
What does it mean to be selfish?:According to dictionary.com, it means this: “devoted to or caring only for oneself, concerned primarily with one’s own interests, benefits, welfare, etc., regardless of others.” To me, this does not sound like a health care worker who goes to African to risk her life to save the lives of others. It sounds much like the people criticizing and threatening here.
Hickox is a strong young woman who spoke a lot of truth to a lot of power, thus, she is arrogant, not admirable. The mostly male politicians who shout and argue never seem to be called selfish or arrogant, they make Hickox look like a church mouse. There is the idea – familiar to strong women – that she overstepped herself, she ought to have just shut up and stayed in the tent. After all, said the governor of New Jersey, who prides himself on having a big and loud mouth, what was she whining about, she had the best food Newark, N.H. has to offer?
To me, Hickox is a symbol of selflessness in the increasingly Selfish Nation. I don’t hear people calling for more help for African, more health workers going there, more ways to make it easy and comfortable for them to go. We seem to only care about ourselves, but we demand the world love us and follow our guidance.
Health care workers are a special breed, not unlike firemen or people who rush to pull others out of burning cards. Their lives are filled with risk and challenge. The best ones are not like us, they are not driven to the worst things, to cancer wards and dying children, and intensive care units, and trauma centers. They are drawn to Ebola epidemics in Africa. Hickox does not need to be scolded by people sitting on their growing butts staring at computer screens. Nobody had to remind her to go to Africa, or go back again. She voluntarily agreed to stay out of her own town even though she is no risk to anyone, so no one there would feel uncomfortable. Making people comfortable is what health care workers do, she does not need governors or people on Facebook to tell her about it.
Hickox is fighting for the idea that she and other people can go to Africa and help without being stigmatized, punished, or locked up in tents for a month. And that medicine and science trumps politics and hysteria, an idea that would have saved Rebecca Nurse’s life and the lives of many others.
The effort to quarantine her, she said in an interview Sunday, was not the result of an “abundance of caution” but an “abundance of politics.” More truth. We have no Governor Phips, only Governors Pander. Where, I wonder, does she get her courage and passion, and do they sell it on Amazon? I could have it here by tomorrow.
On my Facebook Page, people come every day and post outraged and angry messages about Kaci Hickox being selfish. I have an almost magical solution to people who do that. I ask them what they are doing to help the people afflicted with Ebola in Africa. It’s like waving a wand, they simply and invariably vanish.
If you look closely at the rage and indignation hurled at Kaci Hickox in the media and across the spectrum of the Internet, she will, almost in front of your eyes, morph into Rebecca Nurse, another strong woman who spoke up for herself and paid for it with her life. In America, we don’t care much for history. Everywhere, Hickox is called “selfish”, “arrogant”, “callous”, “spoiled”, “dangerous,” a “menace” to health and safety. The police chief in her town reports that he is flooded with calls from around the country demanding she be imprisoned, people on Facebook say she ought to be in jail.
If you read much history, it seems that these stomach-wrenching hysterias, they are part of human nature. They seem to catch fire and burn everything in front of them, ending only when people are revolted by their own cruelty and ignorance and when a Governor Phips appears, a leader brave enough to face down the mob.
Kaci Hickox is already part of our long and often cruel history, she is making history in front of us, she is our new cautionary tale, strong and unwavering in her humanity and her convictions. She is the heir to Rebecca Towne Nurse, fighting for a different ending to the story. They are linked in time, history and human natureShe reminds us of the things mobs do, where they lead when truth and reasoning are overwhelmed by panic, anger and ignorance.
She also challenges me to look at myself, she inspires me to never join the angry mob, to find my own truth and stand in it. Anyone who can do that is an admirable human being, if not a hero. I am called upon to think of what I can do, something worthwhile in the Selfish Nation. Light and hope follow black clouds, perhaps a great clearing. I am working on it, for me the first thing I can do and the least I can do is use my voice, my words, my curious spotlight to remember.