We’re Losing The AIDS Fight
by Jorge Vargas
Forced migrations from urban centers, government agencies keeping tabs on people’s health records, people shunning others because of their conditions, health forcing you into a sub-culture, people refusing to get tested, a virus threatens to wipe out humanity. It’s not a movie. It’s the AIDS crisis.
HIV/AIDS will most likely not end humanity – if the situation gets dire, less humane treatments might even be enacted before it gets to that – but it’s certainly taking its toll on us. Sub-Saharan Africa, amongst other areas, is currently at its knees before the virus, whereas India is likely to be the next major victim, mostly due to prostitution and a lack of information in the rural areas. Brazil, Haiti, and China aren’t too far from a major crisis either, and urban centers in the Untied States are also becoming sexual health hazards.
What can be done to prevent the spread of the disease? According to the United States, we would need abstinence in order to give them money for medication. That, in itself, is patronizing of the United States and foolishly moralizing. Protestant morals won’t help protect against the great disease of our time – if it were your daughter, Mr. Bush, would you give everything you had to find a cure or would you moralize to her about abstinence?
In fact, this focus on medication is the wrong way to go about it. Prevention is the key. Free condoms will do it, as will research on creating a type of spermicide geared to find and kill the virus if it becomes present. Mandatory testing might even be necessary to allow governments to know who has the virus and who doesn’t.
Yes, it’s a violation of privacy, but the government also knows how much money I make every year, it knows where I live, it knows where I go to school, it knows my age and the type of car I drive. I don’t really mind if the government knows that tiny bit of my health history.
But more so than prevention, we need a new attitude. HIV/AIDS is not the disease of the homosexuals. It’s not the disease of prostitutes. It’s the disease of high school students. It’s the disease of drunken kids at a party. It’s the disease of responsible adults who figured they didn’t need a condom. It’s the disease of responsible adults whose condoms broke. And more recently, it’s the disease of children conceived with the virus. And more importantly, it’s the disease that can kill you. It’s the disease that you may have.
This is not the first time that we’ve been at our knees before a virus. The bubonic plague once threatened to wipe out Europe and could have spread into the Middle East and even Africa, had we not found out what was the cause. In this instance, things are easier, because we know the cause. The problem is that people everywhere have been captured by the ‘it can’t happen to me’ attitude and it’s extremely dangerous for all of us.
Until we learn how to deal with the virus, we’ll have to deal with the cruel practices that opened this article, because that’s all that we know to do when we’re trying to avoid the true cause of a problem. When we stop refusing to accept the awful truth that sex isn’t the true cause, we might be able to work to stop the spread. Until we realize that the problem is with our own mindsets and our own self-righteousness and our own moralizing, beware of the virus. Beware because that cold might be more than a cold.
