Thank You, Freedom. Signed, Ebola.

Yesterday afternoon I decided to make a concerted effort to stay abreast of world events going forward. Especially given the continued spread of Ebola across America, I could no longer focus solely on happenings within the tech industry as I have for the past two or three years. No sooner had I made this decision, though, than I came across a ponderous and subsequently maddening article over at NBC News titled “New Jersey Releases Nurse Quarantined for Suspected Ebola”.

The article’s author, Maggie Fox, told of a nurse who had been forcibly quarantined in New Jersey after returning to America following a lengthy trip to West Africa. The nurse, Kaci Hickox, had treated patients infected with Ebola, and as a result New Jersey authorities had ordered her quarantined upon landing. This made sense to me — after all, it was thanks to a lack of such proactive measures that Ebola spread from Texas to my home state of Ohio, and will spread from here to God only knows where else because the infected individual did not have the common sense to regulate her ability to infect others, and the CDC did not have the sense to advise her to do so. The infuriating part of this story was not some perceived governmental overreach, then, but rather the nurse’s response to such reasonable measures: not only has she complained publicly, but Kaci Hickox has gone so far as to hire a lawyer to argue her case in court. Unsurprisingly, the more liberal-leaning CNN supports her case and paints the situation as a blatant human rights violation.

Give me a break.

Ebola spread to America because of an unwillingness to restrict travel from counties known to harbor the virus, particularly for people known to have come in direct contact with the virus, and thanks to inadequate screening measures that were put into place all too late to do much good. American officials, those in possession of the power to actually enforce preventative measures, quite literally allowed Ebola to walk off a plane and enter the heart of this nation. As if this was not bad enough, they then allowed individuals that came in contact with this man for extended periods during his treatment to travel across the country. No wonder an isolated case in Texas spread to the midwest, and then branched out from there. Shocker.

Ebola may have started spreading across the nation, and continues to do so in a manner that looks alarmingly like the onset of a pandemic, but hey — at least only one person’s rights were so inhumanely violated as Kaci Hickox’s were before everyone caught on and stopped the madness. Thankfully, Thomas Duncan was allowed to enter the country without issue; it would have been terrible to quarantine him in such a degrading way as Kaci Hickox was. “Thank God for freedom, and an unwillingness to impose upon anyone” — so says Ebola, anyway, because it’s thanks to our current, timid nanny state that we have this problem in the first place. It’s asinine, and unfortunately, unlikely to change anytime soon.