ISIS & Ebola Inspire Revisit of Camus' The Plague

President Obama has asked the world to unite in stopping menaces as different as Ebola and ISIS. Leaving ISIS aside for the moment, Ebola is not really a threat to the U.S. Yes, it's a scary disease with no preventive vaccine and a high mortality rate (over 50% in the current outbreak), but Ebola is not easy to contract since the virus is passed along in bodily fluids, not airborne, so special hygiene, medical support, and good water/sewer systems can prevent contagion (basics lacking in poor African areas). Other diseases pose greater threats to the homeland; setting aside defunct menaces like smallpox, there's influenza (a perennial problem, with the specter of the 1918 Spanish flu's 50 million to 70 million world death toll) and AIDS (over 36 million dead worldwide since 1981), for example. Why lead a mobilization against Ebola? Altruistically, we are making a humanitarian appeal to prevent further suffering and loss. There is also political self-interest in preventing the epidemic from causing political/social collapse in Africa, perhaps opening the door to more forces inimical to Western interests. On both the Ebola and ISIS issues, I am reminded of a classic book: The Plague by Albert Camus. In the novel, published in 1947, the North African city of Oran is swept by a plague, causing the city to be sealed off. Various characters -- from doctor, bureaucrat and criminal to priest -- face a world where mass death visits guilty, innocent, young and old indiscriminately; where relationships are broken by quarantine, exile and fear; and where individual decisions on communal resistance vs. fatalistic acceptance vs. self-interest/self-protection move from metaphysical questions to daily choices. The novel certainly provides a paradigm of society facing existential, environmental threats, from Ebola to climate change. But the book also works as an allegory with political and ethical implications, which brings us right back round to ISIS. Originally, The Plague was seen as an allegory of the French Resistance (Camus was a member) to Nazi occupation, but I think it could be read today as an allegory of resistance to ISIS or any other deadly, insidious political movement. To put Ebola in perspective, check out the Al Jazeera infographic: http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/interactive/2014/08/infographic-deadly-ebola-epidemic-west-africa-20148248162913356.html