I remember well the movie The Life of David Gale. I love movies and watch them often. The ones that are memorable, for good or ill, I place in one or more boxes of the mind, and hang onto them... Well, these days I hang onto them for as long as I can. The Life of David Gale occupies a single box with relatively little company. The box is titled "When Good Stars Make Bad Movies."
Given the cast, including Laura Linney and Kevin Spacey, I had high hopes at the beginning. They didn't last long. The movie plodded along with little rhyme or reason. The niceties of good story-telling had been discarded, it seemed, in favor of messaging. In this case, the message seemed to be that the death penalty is bad because seemingly no conviction is air tight. I don't agree with that philosophy, but I'll certainly grant it's an arguable point provided you don't argue it based on the ridiculous, and that's were David Gale turned into David "Fail." What the movie ended up demonstrating at the end was that a person could indeed be wrongly convicted of a capital offense if they formed a conspiracy solely for that purpose. To make their point, the defendant in this case provided false and misleading testimony, withheld exculpatory evidence, and took every pain to ensure that the legal system would reach the wrong conclusion.
Nothing was overlooked, except perhaps a reasonable point. Unless, of course, the point was that society must take all responsibility for the treatment of an individual, that a person has no obligation to participate in their own defense, to cooperate with established procedures, to act vigorously as their own advocate in conjunction with whatever outside assistance is made available. It seems like a garbage argument to me, but it also seems to be one that is increasingly popular in our society. To watch the news, you get the impression that people believe others should be fully responsible for their health insurance, birth control, living wage, level of education, and no doubt a whole slew of other things I am afraid to even guess at. And if they are not accommodated, then obviously the fault cannot be attributed to them, can it? More sinister forces must be at work.
Enter Thomas Eric Duncan, Ebola victim from Texas. His family is calling for an investigation, speculating that his poverty, insurance status, or skin color may have been the reason he died. While the death was tragic and the man and his family have my condolences, let us spare everyone the time and expense of such an investigation. Eric Thomas Duncan did not die because of his poverty, lack of insurance, or his ethnic group. Mr. Duncan died because he had been in a hazardous disease-ridden area and came in contact with Ebola. Everything else is just speculation.
Now, there certainly were things that could have been done to improve Mr. Duncan's chances for survival. Mistakes were made, serious mistakes. No one is denying that. What people are far less forthcoming about is that the most egregious mistakes were made by Mr. Duncan himself. He is the one that went to the area. He is also the one that, knowing how severe the spread of the sickness was and the chances of him being exposed, withheld that vital information from travel officials on several continents. He is also the one that visited several local schools in Texas after returning, still with the understanding that he had likely been exposed. Oddly, there isn't a lot coming out of the press or family about that. And if children start dying from Mr. Duncan's actions, and then their parents, will the family acknowledge his guilt in that? I wonder.
There's nothing wrong with feeling sympathy for the death, especially for those who had such a horrible passing. We would be less than human if we did not grieve. But we must also look to the causes of such ends and take responsible action to treat those causes. One treatment for this kind of tragedy, an aid in preventing it in the future, might be called "good citizenship." At one time, it was expected of people. Now, not so much. Good citizenship, you see, requires a lot of the individual. It requires a certain degree of maturity, integrity, and responsibility, things once cherished and encouraged across the nation. With them, a country has a foundation for establishing and maintaining a profitable and orderly society. Without them, we have individuals putting the lives of thousands, or even millions, at risk while blaming hospitals, corporations, and anyone else they can think of. Anyone except themselves.
There has been much commentary made of the delay of adulthood in the nation these days. Marriage, employment, children, all of the things that used to mark the transition of a person from adolescent to full adulthood, are coming later and later it seems. That's a trend that we have to stop. More than that, we have to reverse it, and the reason is simple: The nation needs adults. The nation needs responsible citizens. These are the people that make things work and keep things working. Without them, our nation might have about the same chance of surviving as David Gale. And as with David, it will be no one's fault but our own.
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