To the editor:
Fellow Mainers, I’m disappointed in you.
I left Aroostook County three years ago to pursue college. You supported me: your local organizations awarded me scholarships, your businesses employed me, your professionals got my rust-bucket Subaru patched together enough to make it over the mountains, and your medical professionals kept me healthy in mind and body. I am grateful to have been offered such a wonderful start in a brave, generous, caring, empathetic community.
Today, I see and hear you responding with fear and anger to an individual in your midst, nurse Kaci Hickox. Hickox, it seems, is a leper in your midst. How dare she ride her bicycle and order pizza, when she is recently returned from treating Ebola patients? How dare she selfishly risk the health of her community, our community, to do such trivial things? You are scared. I am a little bit scared, too.
Mostly, however, I am grateful to Kaci Hickox for her disobedience. Even for those who don’t study history (and, to be honest, I don’t study it much myself), it’s easy to call to mind a number of circumstances in which ‘selfish’ disobedience has protected higher ideals: ideals which protect the good of whole communities, and ideals which we view as more important than our individual good.
To this end, Henry David Thoreau and Martin Luther King, Jr., remind us that sometimes, to protect ourselves from tyranny, we have a responsibility to break the rules when they are unjust. Hickox is not just standing up for something as trivial as her right to ride her bicycle, for surely that would not be worth the crucifixion she is enduring at the hands of the media, or in your self-righteous Facebook posts. Rather, she is standing up for your and my right not to be detained unreasonably, our right to privacy in our own homes, and our right to do more or less as we please when we do not tread upon the rights of others. We generally consider infringements upon such rights as I have mentioned, whether by government or by ordinary citizens, to be unjust.
Fear sells newspapers. It gets you to click. It gets your attention. When we work hard and lead busy lives, sometimes we think we only have time for this kind of attention. Sometimes, however, we cannot afford not to pay better attention: pay better attention to the testimony of trustworthy experts who explain why these people are not contagious, better attention to the larger issues at stake, better attention to a brave, generous, caring, empathetic person who is doing her best to protect rights in general, and not just her own. Remember the many cases in which fear has been on the wrong side, or has been the wrong side on which to be.
Fellow Mainers, I challenge you to respond differently. I challenge you to respond with intention, with careful thought, and with empathy instead of with fear. I think you may find, when you make the time for this kind of attention, that you may not have a leper in your midst. You may find you are less afraid. You may find it easier to be the kind, thoughtful people I remember, and appreciate, and love. I hope you do.
Marina DiMarco
Middlebury College, Vt.
