Almost two-thirds of American students feel that the United States has no right to get involved in Ebola, and that American intervention will only make the crisis worse, according to a Dandy Goat survey carried out at campuses across the United States this week.
“Just bombing innocent Ebolan women and children will only create more resentment, and more of them will want to fight us,” said USC freshman Duncan Star.
Duncan’s friend Nancy Curry, a political science major, agreed. “The Reagan administration and especially Rumsfeld and Cheney sold the Ebolans a lot of these chemical weapons in the first place, in the 1970s, and so if they use them against us, that’s like a kind of irony,” she said.
Asked if they feared Ebola posed an imminent threat to the U.S. mainland, many students expressed confidence the virus could be kept out. “If you come from Ebola and you get on a plane, Homeland Security can just go like hey, whoa, dude, that’s an Ebolan passport, you can’t come in here, man,” said Larry Young, a business student at George Mason University. He admitted however that such action would be racist.
Other respondents expressed some concern that Ebola could enter the U.S. by crossing the border with Mexico.
“I believe that Ebolans do in fact speak a dialect of Spanish,” said Melinda Hoight, also at GMU. “So they could like pretend to be drug smugglers and come across the border that way.”
Barry Potter, a SUNY anthropology major, blamed historical U.S. interference in global affairs for the current situation.
“Like, the CIA overthrew the President of Ebola, I think it was like General Mossadeq or maybe General Thaarg, back in the 1920s because we wanted to control their oil. So that’s why they are fighting us today, because of like American neo-imperialism.”
Susan Drake, who is studying medieval literature in Mississippi, said she had been told by one of her professors that one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter, adding, “I thought that was kind of a patriarchal thing to say, because I’m a woman and I also think the Ebolans are freedom fighters. But still that doesn’t give them the right to kill innocent doctors and nurses.”