WORLD AIDS DAY: GETTING TO ZERO

I celebrated my 51st birthday on Monday. I was 28 years old when the first World Aids Day was observed. I remember when AIDS was considered a terrifying Old Testament-like, modern plague. Folks had embraced forgiving, loving meek-and-humble-lamb Jesus, and conveniently forgot all about the God of Exodus, whose wrath and judgment hadn't evolved with time and trends the way they'd hoped. AIDS was widely considered an indictment sent from an angry God whose patience with mankind's choices had worn painfully thin. Due to His hatred of, and our tolerance of homosexuality, the world would witness the puzzling effects of a mysterious form of pneumonia. For a long time, it was deemed a gay man's disease, and everyone who wasn't a gay man felt weirdly safe and spared. AIDS was the problem of someone else, in another place, that only visited some households courtesy of nightly newscasts, and talk shows.

Then, people who were idolized AND familiar started losing much too much weight, and dying much too young.

I remember being fascinated as a 20 year-old college student at Howard University, hearing my sculpture instructor, Ed Love's sister in-law, Dr. Frances Cress Welsing, lecture with conviction on the speculated, vicious, man made origin of the disease (which didn't seem so far fetched in light of the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment). 

I saw first-hand how AIDS wasted my talented, ambitious family member, who was active military and stationed at USAMRIID. 

I remember driving him to the hospital one night and watching how the emergency room staff attended to patient after patient, even those who came in after us. The doctors and nurses seemed to be uncaring and indifferent toward us. A nice nurse brought him a blanket when he complained of being cold, but we still waited for hours until he finally fell asleep in the waiting room chair. As he slept, I was finally told that his condition wasn't considered an emergency, since they already knew he had AIDS. It was the first time I knew. AIDS had visited my family. He never uttered the word concerning himself. Besides, he was Black and he had girlfriends, right? So much for my ignorance. As we waited into the wee hours of the next day, I asked him if he wanted anything from me. He simply asked me to hold his hand and pray. When his illness progressed and he was discharged from the military, and no longer able to care for himself, he went back to the childhood home he'd worked so diligently to escape, and died in his childhood room while in the care of his mother. He was buried in the colors of his fraternity of which he was very proud. His strikingly handsome lover died soon after.

AIDS has outed couples, exposed husbands on the DL, pronounced death sentences on wives, orphaned children, ravaged artistic communities, revolutionized how our nation manages its blood supply, welcomed innocent babies into the world, and rocked numerous religious establishments from pulpits to doors. It has challenged how we think and what we believe; who we trust and how much. It has driven us to our knees, deeper into our wallets, aggressively to the polls, and frequently to funerals.
Embarrassed, shame-filled families have tried to tactfully word their loved ones' obituaries, using terms like "long illness", "sudden affliction", and "brief sickness". Grieving loved ones have been relieved to be able to evoke the name of a disease, ANY disease as a cause of death, or defensively cry "blood transfusion", than to name the actual killer. If we were secretive before, we multiplied our privacy requirement exponentially.
After all these years, people are still living dangerously, living in denial, believing lies, testing the grace of God, ignoring or abridging His Word, and counting on--even demanding-- the help, understanding, compassion and so-called enlightenment, or open mindedness of others. Some people still press their luck and live by the adage, "You have to die from something." They still think "It could never happen to me."

Have we become lax and complacent as we often do after the novelty of tragedy begins to wane? The stigma of HIV/AIDS may seem to be gone due to greater access to information, celebrity input, medical breakthroughs, and patient longevity as a result of more effective medicines, but is it really? Do our private conversations with ourselves and others prove it's still there right alongside fear and several chilling, attention-getting Bible verses? Some people don't care if you call them ignorant, closed-minded, Bible-thumping religious fanatics if they emphatically believe that it is your own fault, and due to your own choices and darkened, godless mind that you are in your present situation. AIDS affecting the elderly, heterosexuals, hemophiliacs, women, children, sexually inactive, and drug free people of all age groups, nationalities, professions and socioeconomic levels, threw a monkey wrench into so many philosophies. Pandemic is not a word to ignore.

Are we doing all we can, with our ribbons and marches and quilts, and concerts, and commemorative days, and speeches, or are we quietly still viewing the AIDS pandemic as a deadly lesson in sowing and reaping? Is it still looked upon as a deserved consequence of sin?

No matter where AIDS originated, be it Heaven, Africa, Los Angeles, Haiti, affected monkeys, the military, vaccines, racist governments, or a strategically planned, controlled top-secret science lab, it is a horrible, devastating, lingering fact of life that has, no doubt, directly or indirectly affected us one and all. 

"Zero new HIV infections. Zero discrimination. Zero AIDS-related deaths".
That would be more than wonderful.