World AIDS Day 2006

I tend not to speak much about HIV/AIDS on a regular basis (at least I don’t think so), mostly because I don’t really know what can be done to stop it, and I’m not even sure most people want to hear it. But I’m going to say something useless and stupid, but hey, it’s World AIDS Day, and if the entire readership of the blog (2) read this…then at least it’s something.

I have a thousand stories to tell about this wretched disease. Some of them are wonderful stories about humanity in the face of AIDS, and some of them are awful stories about the ravages of the disease, and some of them are eye-witness accounts of visceral incarnations of tragic clichés so foul that I get upset just thinking about them. In my daily life since I’ve returned to law school, it’s sometimes hard to remember that AIDS is still out there. That my old friends from Freedom still spend every single day trying to help people cope with the devastation of a virus. A virus.

A freakin’ virus.

AIDS is not going away. Even though we’ve all been talked to death about it, and it’s all over the media, and it’s the trendy band-wagon issue for celebrities, GAP, and whoever else to jump onto…AIDS is a forgotten epidemic. As the third biggest cause of human death, how is that? We’ve been oversaturated with shrill doom-and-gloom, we’ve been smothered with sob stories, and AIDS has become a warm and fuzzy issue that we universally recognize but fail to actually think about. It’s almost as if the more we talk about it, the less we think it’s necessary to do anything. And even when we do hear the "new ideas" about AIDS, especially in this country, it’s controversy over some stupid, moralistic crusade against condom use -- Actual debate over the utter idiocy of abstinence-only AIDS policy.

Why have we really forgotten? AIDS has slowed among the affluent. Among whites. Among the middle class. It can no longer scare us. It’s someone else’s problem, like malaria. Like malnutrition. What're the fears we really talk about? Bird flu. West Nile Virus.

AIDS has not stopped, and it has not slowed, it has realigned its rampage. In the US, AIDS is now accelerating in amongst poor black women. In India, AIDS is exploding amongst monogamous Indian wives. Like so many things, AIDS has become an affliction of groups without the ability to fight it. Sure it’s a disease, a virus…but it’s the cause, the effect, the catalyst, and the result of so many things that’re wrong in this world: poverty, failed governments, human error, human desires, failures in public health, lack of education, patriarchy, cultural conservatism, sexual repression, homophobia, the war on drugs, ignorance, failed prison policies, discrimination, collapsed economies…and the list goes on and on. And if you don’t understand how any of the things I just said feed the cycle of infection, just ask. With so many causes and effects, there is no magic bullet. Not even the Warren Commission could believe there's a bullet that could do this.

So I’ll be perfectly frank: There's nothing simple we can do about this. The massive movements in AIDS policy towards massive distribution of antiretroviral drugs, in my opinion, may just be the trigger for a more powerful, drug-resistant epidemic. The inability for policymakers to move behind lunacy like abstinence-only, or prevention-only, or antiretroviral drugs-only is not going to help us stop the problem. Any solution requires everybody.

The only thing I can say is this: AIDS will not be solved by concerted government action or by action by UNAIDS. It will not be soothed by the passion and compassion of the few. And it will not be something that “others” will remedy. Unless a medical cure comes to light, this is simple fact. To end the physical infection of a virus, to end the devastation of stigma, and to save the lives of those infected and affected has nothing to do with a few dedicated people trying hard, or pushing themselves to the limit to find a solution. It’s not about grandstanding, or making a scene, or a huge demonstration of energy. This problem, like so many others, simply requires that each person make the tiniest decision to not make things worse, but better. By not getting infected, by not passing it on, by not stigmatizing the infected...Having each and every person make the tiniest commitment. And for Americans, the decision is usually pretty easy. Getting the rest of the world to a position where they can be faced with the same decisions, and find the same ease in making them is the challenge...