Posted on 08/06/2014 1:07:12 PM PDT by Kaslin
I wonder how the Ebola doctor feels now that his humanitarian trip has cost a Christian charity much more than any services he rendered.
What was the point?
Whatever good Dr. Kent Brantly did in Liberia has now been overwhelmed by the more than $2 million already paid by the Christian charities Samaritan's Purse and SIM USA just to fly him and his nurse home in separate Gulfstream jets, specially equipped with medical tents, and to care for them at one of America's premier hospitals. (This trip may be the first real-world demonstration of the economics of Obamacare.)
There's little danger of an Ebola plague breaking loose from the treatment of these two Americans at the Emory University Hospital. But why do we have to deal with this at all?
Why did Dr. Brantly have to go to Africa? The very first "risk factor" listed by the Mayo Clinic for Ebola -- an incurable disease with a 90 percent fatality rate -- is: "Travel to Africa."
Can't anyone serve Christ in America anymore?
No -- because we're doing just fine. America, the most powerful, influential nation on Earth, is merely in a pitched battle for its soul.
About 15,000 people are murdered in the U.S. every year. More than 38,000 die of drug overdoses, half of them from prescription drugs. More than 40 percent of babies are born out of wedlock. Despite the runaway success of "midnight basketball," a healthy chunk of those children go on to murder other children, rape grandmothers, bury little girls alive -- and then eat a sandwich. A power-mad president has thrown approximately 10 percent of all Americans off their health insurance -- the rest of you to come! All our elite cultural institutions laugh at virginity and celebrate promiscuity.
So no, there's nothing for a Christian to do here.
If Dr. Brantly had practiced at Cedars-Sinai hospital in Los Angeles and turned one single Hollywood power-broker to Christ, he would have done more good for the entire world than anything he could accomplish in a century spent in Liberia. Ebola kills only the body; the virus of spiritual bankruptcy and moral decadence spread by so many Hollywood movies infects the world.
If he had provided health care for the uninsured editors, writers, videographers and pundits in Gotham and managed to open one set of eyes, he would have done more good than marinating himself in medieval diseases of the Third World.
Of course, if Brantly had evangelized in New York City or Los Angeles, The New York Times would get upset and accuse him of anti-Semitism, until he swore -- as the pope did -- that you don't have to be a Christian to go to heaven. Evangelize in Liberia, and the Times' Nicholas Kristof will be totally impressed.
Which explains why American Christians go on "mission trips" to disease-ridden cesspools. They're tired of fighting the culture war in the U.S., tired of being called homophobes, racists, sexists and bigots. So they slink off to Third World countries, away from American culture to do good works, forgetting that the first rule of life on a riverbank is that any good that one attempts downstream is quickly overtaken by what happens upstream.
America is the most consequential nation on Earth, and in desperate need of God at the moment. If America falls, it will be a thousand years of darkness for the entire planet.
Not only that, but it's our country. Your country is like your family. We're supposed to take care of our own first. The same Bible that commands us to "go ye into all the world and preach the Gospel" also says: "For there will never cease to be poor in the land. Therefore I command you, 'You shall open wide your hand to your brother, to the needy and to the poor, in your land.'"
Right there in Texas, near where Dr. Brantly left his wife and children to fly to Liberia and get Ebola, is one of the poorest counties in the nation, Zavala County -- where he wouldn't have risked making his wife a widow and his children fatherless.
But serving the needy in some deadbeat town in Texas wouldn't have been "heroic." We wouldn't hear all the superlatives about Dr. Brantly's "unusual drive to help the less fortunate" or his membership in the "Gold Humanism Honor Society." Leaving his family behind in Texas to help the poor 6,000 miles away -- that's the ticket.
Today's Christians are aces at sacrifice, amazing at serving others, but strangely timid for people who have been given eternal life. They need to buck up, serve their own country, and remind themselves every day of Christ's words: "If the world hates you, know that it has hated me before it hated you."
There may be no reason for panic about the Ebola doctor, but there is reason for annoyance at Christian narcissism.
First , Samaritan’s Purse is going to reap a windfall of donations from this. Second,George Muller, Adoniram Judson and hundreds of others were led by God to these faraway disease infested backwaters long before The US threatened to become one. Heard of “Dr. Livingstone, I presume?”
Most important, Jesus himself,
Mark 10:29,30:29 And Jesus answered and said, Verily I say unto you, There is no man that hath left house, or brethren, or sisters, or father, or mother, or wife, or children, or lands, for my sake, and the gospel’s,
30 But he shall receive an hundredfold now in this time, houses, and brethren, and sisters, and mothers, and children, and lands, with persecutions; and in the world to come eternal life.
OTOH, I suppose a hashtag would have been just as effective.
When a Christian helps a person and does not explain that the reason he helps them is because of the grace of God who saved him and saves all those who believe in Christ, he has done nothing more than a kind atheist or agnostic might have done, i.e. “social justice”, a tool of communism. I doubt most Christian servants realize this.
http://www.orlando-systems.com/davila.html
http://www.amtech-group.com/Military.Engineering/Ds94145.Rev1.mobilelab.pdf
Liberia is where the money is.
You can’t get nearly as much in the collection plate for a town in Texas as you can get for a town in Liberia.
Besides that, youth groups from churches across the south take care of the small American towns. Youth missions accomplish more than one doctor
Yes, I know. Its inevitable.
She’s right. All of our problems here at home are solved? Right?
No?
So... Why bother helping those who will hate us no matter what we do?
Wouldn’t the “right thing”, the “moral thing”, be to get our own House in order before going anywhere else?
Rsubzero(USA)=Zero and is likely to remain that way if the only two persons entering the USA with ebola are the Dr. and the nurse. Rsubzero in third world countries will never equal Rsubzero in the USA. Especially when the people infected are in quarantine at Emory. That’s the current math here in the USA which is what our discussion was centered on. Relax, make a sign and stand at the border chanting “sick Americans not welcome”. Maybe Ann will join you.
The right thing to do is to stay out of Dr Brantly’s personal business. Isn’t it bad enough having the government telling us what we can and can’t do on our own dime and time, now we have to have Ann Coulter doing the same?
I hate to agree with the living matchstick but she asks a valid question.
Many who are Christians like to think of “charity”’as going off to some exotic location for (at most) a few months in a year or a few years of life. Or only donating money or clothing or even volunteer time to a charity (no matter how noble that organization is), and there’s a bonus for such “charity”: it’s usually tax-deductible.
There’s a common thread to most “charitable” activities though, and that is: the more distant, the more separate, from one’s own soul, one’s heart, one’s life, the better. This is a tendency we all have as fallen human beings. Compartmentalizing all our activities, putting them in neat categories, easily managed, not really impacting us. Not really a threat to us. Minimizing and mitigating any negative emotion or real turmoil that comes when one actually gets “down and dirty” with charity, in other words letting the people one is “helping” actually become someone of importance in one’s life. A person one grows to care about and wants to know everything there is to know about that person. A person who is truly loved in other words.
The missionaries come closest to this but even they miss it when they eventually leave, to come back home where it’s safe, safe from the misery of reality.
This is, though, what Jesus wants from all of us. He wants us to engage in the drama of life, with all it’s joy AND pain. This is true charity. And this is found at home, in listening to your husband or wife when they want to just have an ear to hear their pain. Or spending time with your children, being part of their life in a meaningful way. Or in helping your neighbor down the street shovel his sidewalk, or bringing food to a shut in in your neighborhood and spending time with them just talking. Or visiting that crazy relative no one else wants to visit. Or helping some homeless get off the street not just by giving them money or driving them to a shelter but being Christ for them in whatever way you can.
It’s hard. It sucks. It’s local. That’s charity. It’s what we were made for; anything else is mere substitution.
I think that Dr Brantly had no right to expose his young family to anything they might have picked up in Africa.
In epidemiology, you know it doesn’t work like that, and you know with the current southern border issues, that the number of infected patients in the US is unknown.
The way this disease is being handled, and has been handled so far, is unacceptable.
This is the point of the article. At one point you have to enact protocols WE KNOW to be effective. One of them is keeping this stuff OUT of the US.
It is apparent you have absolutely no background in this stuff.
This is science and math, not romance. Can’t lead with your heart here.
Look, I’m 63 years old, an electronic engineer. When I took the GRE’s , 0.1% of the population got a higher score than me on the math section. This means I missed one math question on the GRE’s and 0.1% didn’t miss any. I haven’t slowed down much either. So unless you are part of that 0.1% I take your condescension as a joke.
Our discussion was about returning Dr. Brantly and the nurse to the USA for medical care. Not about securing borders, R subzero rates in Liberia or a comparison of transmission sensitivity in third world versus advanced economies with outsized medical and scientific capabilities.
You oppose letting Americans back in their country for medical care, I support it. Let’s leave it at that.
http://www.sgberman.com/2014/08/07/ann-coulter-is-great-but-id-rather-be-like-kent-brantly/
OK she’s not “great” but it makes a good title.
Wasn’t doing it on his own dime though was he? And now, his treatment is also not on his own dime...
Socialism sucks. Regardless of who is doing it.
Absent that, your statement would be correct...
He was doing it on his own dime actually, as a Christian Doctor with Samaritans Purse. I don’t know who is paying for his medical care however.
OK, so do the math. I’m also a EE, but my professional experience took me in a direction that I consult on stuff like this.
To a degree, once you become infected with something that has no known cure, and can be communicated through saliva, AND can be infect a person with as little as 1 to 10 individual virii, you have just become a different class of American.
Again, UNLESS you are bringing them back as test subjects, and they’ve effectively signed their lives away to this end, then there’s no legal or good reason to bring them home again.
AND even if they agree to be test subjects, you find a place, or establish a place, where you can do the research in situ.
If, and I say if, Guinea communicates like Reston did, where it can make its way safely through a standard HVAC system and infect other people, then this is the call you have to make.
Unfortunately, for everybody, there is very little reliable information to use in order to be able to even have an opinion about these two people. In the absence of better information, you prepare for the worst.
Patton once said, “Fixed fortifications are a testament to the folly of man.” This was never truer than for pathogens. When it takes so little pathogen to infect a person, it’s even more true.
It’s not condescension. It’s what you find among engineers especially - I’m good at one thing so I’m at least knowledgeable about others. The math is the math. The bug is in Jeddah. Jeddah’s not far from Mecca. The guy who brought it back died just 3 days after returning from SL.
That means he was symptomatic ON THE PLANE back to Jeddah. If the bug makes it to a pilgrim, and they go to Mecca, that’s the only thing you need to open this up to every country on the planet who has devout muslims in it. It’s easier to count the countries that don’t have devout muslims in it.
That your an engineer means you can calculate the safety factor of a system where the safety factors of each component of the system are in line with each other.
A system with four inline components, each with a safety factor of 99% gives you an overall system safety factor of 96%. Some folks refer to a safety factor as a reliability rating.
You think about all the inline systems that have to work in order to get an infected patient back to the US from Africa, and that is more than four.
Add to this that Writebol was infected not by patient contact - her job was cleaning equipment. So, consider all the protocol-required equipment she was using to do a routine job in fighting a pandemic-level pathogen and she was infected anyway.
Your heart is getting in the way of your head. In these types of emergencies, that is the number one way these sorts of diseases become world history making events. Sawyer went home, knowing he was infected, to see his kids.
You should know better - you’ve got the education for it.
I stopped listening to her when she got into bed with Christie. That was it for me.
LOL!
Jesus said “go into all the world”. Matthew 24 We go where He sends us. How pitiful that Ann is not aware of the missionaries in Chicago, or Texas or anywhere else.
He sends us to Africa, also. My brother and sister-in-law have been missionaries with SIM for the past 40 years. He teaches house and road building and well-drilling. She cares for the sick and babies with AIDS and gives immunizations. Most importantly, they tell the people of Sudan, and more recently Ethiopia about the love of Jesus Christ.
I’m so sad reading Ann’s column. She has finally lost me and I’ve been an apologist for her for many years.
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