The headlines scream from every device. Ebola is back. The Democratic Republic of Congo is bleeding again.
British aid agencies are scrambling. The narrative is familiar. It always is.
We are told this is ‘deeply alarming’. We are told this is a crisis. We are told to feel.
But I ask you: to what end? We have become a culture that worships at the altar of perpetual emergency. Every outbreak is the next Black Death.
Every virus is a civilisation-ender. And yet, here we stand. Rome fell to barbarians, not microbes.
The Victorian era endured cholera and typhus with a stiff upper lip and a dose of practical sanitation. We, however, have traded resilience for hysteria. This is not to minimise the tragedy in the Congo.
Real people are dying. Real families are being torn apart. But let us be intellectually honest.
Ebola is a localised horror. It is not a global pandemic. It spreads through close contact, not airborne whispers.
The response from the UK aid agency is predictable and reflexive. Send the teams. Send the money.
Send the press releases. But where is the long-term thinking? The Congo’s health system is a ruin.
That is the real plague. We pour millions into emergency response but nothing into building the basic infrastructure that would prevent the next outbreak. The Victorians understood this.
They built sewers. They cleaned water. They didn’t just run around with leeches and prayer.
We, by contrast, have elevated the emergency to a art form. It feels good to be needed. It feels heroic to deploy.
But it is a parody of heroism. We are firemen who set the house ablaze, then rush in to save the furniture. The deeper issue is our collective decadence.
We have lost the stomach for the mundane. We crave the adrenaline of the crisis. Ebola provides that rush.
It is the perfect spectacle. It has blood, fear, and an exotic location. It plays to our post-colonial guilt.
We can be the saviours. We can be the good guys. But the real heroes would be the Congolese doctors and nurses working without pay, without equipment, without hope.
And they do. Every day. They do not need our pity.
They need our respect and our long-term commitment. I am tired of the ‘deeply alarming’ rhetoric. It is a crutch.
It absolves us of the responsibility to think. The Ebola outbreak is a tragedy. But it is also a mirror.
Look into it. Do you see a concerned global citizen? Or do you see a civilisation addicted to its own fear?
