World AIDS Day is Today
Today is World AIDS Day. While America sleeps, tens of thousands of people are living with a highly transmittable disease of which we aren’t supposed to speak.
It’s sad to think that such a pervasive disease cannot get the airtime and attention given to breast cancer. I remember the outcry many years ago where a few prominent televangelists labeled AIDS "the gay disease," and summarily doomed any effort to combat the problem in the USA. Others of similar beliefs dismiss AIDS as a heavenly retribution for promiscuity. Or for poverty, as if that is ever a conscious choice. I can’t help wondering how those same people would react if their virginal daughters contracted AIDS through a blood transfusion, for example. Would they then believe their own rhetoric?
Meanwhile, over in the UK, they’re seeing RED and organizing fund raising in harmony with the single thing people share in all the affluent, industrialized nations: shopping. Buy a RED product, wear a red ribbon. Force the world to acknowledge a disease that affects us all.
While AIDS is the Disease That We Must Not Mention, breast cancer, by comparison, is widely publicized. Everybody worries about breast cancer these days although fewer women die from it than from AIDS. Even conservative ministers like tits, it seems.