By Priya Desai
Staff Writer
@priusdasani

“I would rather get Ebola than see this” I read on Twitter as the picture attached appears with a premature ‘I love you’ text from a new girlfriend.

Somehow to this person, having a disease that shuts down your vital organs within a week without treatment is equivalent to having to deal with an awkward high school relationship.

While I understand Twitter is a place to have a laugh about current issues, Ebola should not be something kids use to get favorites and retweets or popularity boosts. It is a disrespectful slap in the face to every victim that is enduring, will endure or has died from the virus.

I have never been one to tweet things that could be taken as offensive. Often large accounts with thousands of followers maintain their fan base with inappropriate topical jokes. I follow a few of these accounts because there are a few tweets that are humorous, but this tweet and anything else mocking Ebola was not.  They were immature because they tried to make a serious situation something to laugh about, which is quite frankly, wrong.

It was after I wrote an informative story about Ebola that I realized how ignorant the tweets were. Spending days on days researching the disease, reading news article after news article, medical report after medical report, I truly understood the gravity of what was going on on the other side of the world and locally.

Here are a few statistics and facts from about the disease everyone should know before they crack a joke: more than 4,500 people have died from Ebola. While the media is focusing on those in the United States due to the prevention of an outbreak, people in the western region of Africa, such as Sierra Leone, Liberia and New Guinea, are being infected everyday due to low sanitation, lack of resources to help sanitation and just a lack of experience of how to treat such a disease with what they have.

The virus does not take long to carry out its deadly mission. On average within 5-9 days within showings symptoms like diarrhea, vomiting, fever and extreme weakness patients die.  Ebola kills from within first shutting down the immune system keeping you weak and vulnerable, then attacking and shutting down your major organs until you fall prey to its effects like extreme dehydration and unexplained hemorrhaging. Is this something to joke about? I think not.

With that in mind can you still think of posting, favoriting, or retweeting something as tasteless as comparing that torture to having to ‘deal’ with you parents?

Not only is posting these types of things inappropriate, but it also disregards the severity of the situation. America has a tendency to downplay and underestimate the current events in the world. For example, the Malaysian Air flights that disappeared last March were first tragic, but then people took to Twitter and made jokes and fake news reports about something where families lost loved ones and lives were destroyed.

By the lack of outrage for this type of media it has become something we either like or do not like and therefore ignore, seeing this as a solution to the problem. I realized that this was not a solution, it was only adding to the problem.

Imagine the club at Coppell High School, Hope for Africa. They have done some amazing things with their work in Africa such as sponsoring children for food and education, and in the past raising money to help different companies build wells for villages and communities without running water. Think about someone laughing about their efforts or the work that they do cracking jokes about the kids they fight to help. How would they be treated at CHS?

The fact that they would be seen as insensitive shows the problem with this issue. Because Hope for Africa is something close to home and we know those that work to help these people, it’s a topic that is seen as somber and wrong to comment on in a comical way.

Ebola is something foreign to Coppell students, only seen in the news and on the Internet so they feel they can post these inappropriate comments making it a joke. They are seen as different, one an effort to help Africans get water and one to help Africans from a deadly disease, but that shouldn’t be the case especially with a disease such as Ebola.

This does not just concern Ebola in the social media, it takes into account all issues that have been, even if unintentionally, mocked and downplayed. There are still people who believe the Holocaust can be taken lightly. Unfortunately, this is not a new problem the world wide web.

The stupid jokes can be accredited to lack of education and information about the issue. Before I was able to research the virus, I was aware of it affecting those in Africa but not at all to the reality of what these people infected with Ebola have to go through, what their children, sibling and parents have to watch them go through.

When the facts are presented, I am sure those that made jokes claiming to rather have Ebola then having to deal with a needy girlfriend will realize the discontent feeling I used to deal with everyday while scrolling through my news feed.

You do not have to be an activist for those infected with Ebola to start the change. You do not have to cover your Twitter in tweets scolding the world of its ignorance. You just have to stop accepting that funny remarks made about something as serious as Ebola should not be considered funny. It is about keeping people accountable.

So, this week I unfollowed those accounts that felt the need to please their followers with “witty” or “comical” thoughts about those that have suffered through the disease and those that have lost their lives fighting those difficult very few days that they had to survive. Though I will be missing the tweets once it’s over, I know that through a simple act unfollowing them I know I will not be exposed to or have to accept that kind of ill stated media.

Next time you write up a tweet about something in news or in common talk that you think could be possible offensive, imagine saying it aloud to a victim of the event and if doesn’t seem right, it’s not right for you to post. Think before you post.