Lower for Proof

 Back when the Trump administration dismantled USAID—including its global health programs—many people sensibly asked: what happens if there's another major disease outbreak in the Global South? Who will monitor and contain it in its early stages? 

Now, we appear to have our answer. Southern Africa is witnessing another major outbreak of Ebola. The World Health Organization has already declared it a global health emergency. And early reports indicate that the virus spread far past the point at which pre-existing monitoring agencies ought to have detected it. 

At least one health expert has affirmed that the response to the disease would have moved much faster if Trump and Elon Musk had not shuttered US global humanitarian programs in their first weeks in office. 

Now, a U.S. citizen has been infected with the disease, while on a mission trip in Sub-Saharan Africa, and the administration is rushing to respond. U.S. officials have banned travelers from the affected countries and hastened to ensure the public they can keep the outbreak from reaching our shores. 

Oh "strange irony of fate," as a character in Borowski calls it. The U.S. government abolished all foreign aid programs, saying they believe in the law of "America First." People in the Global South are no concern of ours, they said. "Am I my brother's keeper?" And so, they let thousands perish. 

But it turns out—you have to care about the fate of other people. We have a biological kinship that cannot be denied. We share disease vectors and reservoirs. And so, no man is an island. What affects one country or part of the world will eventually affect all. 

In his Past and Present, Thomas Carlyle told an anecdote about an Irish widow who went about from house to house in Edinburgh, begging for food in order to escape starvation. Everyone turned her away, and so she sickened and died. 

But then, in death—according to Carlyle—her corpse infected her neighbors with typhoid fever. They sickened and died in turn.  Carlyle draws the moral: "she proves her sisterhood; her typhus-fever kills them: they actually were her brothers, though denying it! Had man ever to go lower for a proof?"

And so it is with us. Having created in many ways the conditions of poverty in the Global South—having disrupted subsistence economies on the promise of future enrichment from neoliberal global trade—we then turn away the impoverished victims of these same policies. We say: "go and starve, you are no siblings or concern of ours!"

And so, like the Irish widow, they sicken and die. And then, it so happens, we catch the same disease—as a very consequence of our selfishness and hard-heartedness. 

Our refusal to help them then—when merely by continuing our aid and health programs, we could have prevented the outbreak and saved lives—means that no one is here to help us now that the infection has spread to one of our own citizens. 

They actually were our brothers, though we denied it. "Had man ever to go lower for proof" indeed?