Rude Awakening

When doing the readings for this week I was particularly drawn into Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year. This is actually very unlike me. I usually get very bored reading things like this and have a hard time finishing them. When it comes to politics and current events, I am generally apathetic. Unlike most American citizens, I could not be found glued to my television post 9-11 waiting to hear the latest news from the White House. I never scoured the newspapers looking for any news about Al-Qaeda and thoughts of Anthrax never disturbed my sleep at night. I suppose this is because I have faith in our country (and the rest of the world). I have faith that people realize that technology has come a long way and that many countries have the ability to end every thing with a nuclear or even severe biological attach. I have a memory from my late elementary years of a conversation with my mom. My uncle was overseas fighting in the Gulf War at the time. I said to my mom, “I know we can win. All we have to do is drop a BIG bomb on them and then they lose. Why don‘t we just do that now and get it over with?” I was too young to understand the implications of such a thing and my mom had to explain it to me. She told me first that the USA was not the only country out there to have BIG bombs and that if we destroyed a country that there would be retaliation. She explained why a World War III had the potential to destroy our entire planet or at least set us back a century or two. Then she explained the toll this kind of thing would have on the environment. After this explanation I realized that my earlier suggestion was a horrible idea and that while we had the technology to create such devastation that it was wiser not to use it. I thought, “If a child can come to this conclusion, then surely adults already knew this and would never use these horrible weapons.”

When news of the Anthrax attacks broke out I was still not worried. I had faith in the world. Letting loose a biological weapon might be very effective at hurting your enemies but when any biological weapon is released it puts the whole world at risk. The earth is very connected and international travel happens everyday. Lets say that Al-Qaeda infected the USA with some kind of biological weapon. All it would take would be for one person to come in contact with the weapon and bring it overseas for Al-Qaeda’s own country to become infected. There is no way that anyone would be so stupid as to put the entire world at risk, I thought. So I never paid attention to any of the Anthrax news. I thought that the media and the public was making a big deal out of nothing. People even started making Anthrax jokes and that’s when I knew the whole thing had never been a big deal.

Then I read an a chapter from A Journal of the Plague Year and I realized how naïve I was. I realized that Anthrax did indeed make it into this country and could have caused many deaths here. While I had heard about the Anthrax scare from many people I never really grasped the full effect of it until now. What a rude awakening. Reading this exert really made me understand the importance of the public sphere. Without the public sphere then I would never have the opportunity to hear of the experiences and events that Daniel Defoe wrote about. Sometimes you have to envision yourself in a certain place and time to fully grasp the importance of the events that transpired there.