Perspectives: What do you see in this picture? Faces or chalice?

Tragically Thomas Eric Duncan, the first Ebola patient diagnosed in the United States, died today more than a week after he was hospitalized in Dallas. The government ordered five airports screen passengers from West Africa for fever, underscoring concerns about U.S. treatment and preparedness for the virus.

The White House said on Wednesday that extra screening for fever will be carried out for arriving aircraft passengers from West Africa, where the virus has killed nearly 4,000 people in three countries. The screening will start at New York's John F. Kennedy airport from the weekend, and later at Newark Liberty, Washington Dulles, Chicago O'Hare and Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta.

While it is reasonable to be concerned, it strikes me that sometimes we get a bit hysterical over things like this. Compare that one death to these facts:

• Every year in the U.S., an average of more than 100,000 people are shot, according to The Brady Campaign To Prevent Gun Violence.
• Every day in the U.S., an average of 289 people are shot. Eighty-six of them die: 30 are murdered, 53 kill themselves, two die accidentally, and one is shot in a police intervention, the Brady Campaign reports.
• Between 2000 and 2010, a total of 335,609 people died from guns -- more than the population of St. Louis, Mo. (318,069), Pittsburgh (307,484), Cincinnati, Ohio (296,223), Newark, N.J. (277,540), and Orlando, Fla. (243,195) (sources:  CDF, U.S. Census; CDC)
• One person is killed by a firearm every 17 minutes, 87 people are killed during an average day, and 609 are killed every week. (source: CDC)

So far the Ebola virus that has us up in arms has killed 4,000 people in three countries. In the last month and a half, that same number of Americans have died from guns: innocent people, children, the elderly, rich and poor, black and white and brown. Republicans and Democrats, gay and straight, Christians and Jews and atheists.


Yet we calmly live surrounded by guns, even insisting that they have a place in schools, bars and churches.

I am not talking about gun control here, although those are sobering statistics up there. I am talking about how we agitate ourselves about extremely unlikely scenarios while peacefully tolerating other dangerous realities as a part of life.

I am driving to Texas next week. I will spend about six days on the road over the next couple of weeks. Even though I will be going near or through Dallas, I am far more likely to die in an automobile accident than I am to contract Ebola. I'd rather put my thoughts and energy into avoiding the more likely problem than lose sleep over the improbable one.