One Kind of News That Makes Me Angry

            I read a news story yesterday about dozens of schoolgirls and their teachers in Afghanistan being poisoned by toxic chemicals that were apparently sprayed on their schools. The girls and their teachers were hospitalized with nausea, vomiting and headaches, treated and then released. The Taliban has been accused of the poisonings, but has denied responsibility, but local Taliban groups are hypothesized as possibly have acted on their own in this. Similar poisonings happened a year or so ago. A few have argued this was a case of mass hysteria, but the numbers involved are seen as making that unlikely. While I react to many news stories with sadness, this one filled me with rage, as did a similar story about the Boko Haram burning schools in northern Nigeria.

            Several people who commented online to these stories equated such violence with the current cuts to education budgets in the United States. That made me angry too. I think turning every horrifying act anywhere into an example we can use to bolster our own domestic political arguments is a noxious form of self-centeredness. Every bad thing that happens everywhere is not an excuse for me to discuss my pet peeves, valid as they may be.

            As a student of psychology, mass hysteria is an extremely rare phenomena, and is usually limited to a handful of individuals. The principle of Ocham's Razor is helpful here, the mostly likely explanation is the simplest one: the schoolgirls and their teachers got sick because they were poisoned.  

            When I was teaching at Pitt a few years ago, I remember repeatedly seeing a woman in a burqa studying at the table between the elevators outside the English Department. She wore a full burqa, with her hands in gloves and only slits for her eyes. I wondered how she could possibly see well enough to read her textbooks, or how she could take notes in class wearing those gloves. Sadly, it also occurred to me that she could be concealing any manner of weapons under such drapery; although, I did not think that she was doing so. I just recognized a fear that I felt ashamed of. While she could have been an American convert to Islam, I felt it likely she was not. If not, I now marvel at what miracles brought her to the University of Pittsburgh at all.