I won’t trace out the path of radicals (free radicals are even bad in your blood stream!) except for a few issues. Seminary was one step along the way, actual ministry was the next, and then partly because of ministry, I ran into my first AIDS case: a fellow minister. This was the mid-Eighties, just as society was beginning to become aware. He was a handsome, intelligent, well-connected young man, the treasured son of a stalwart veteran minister in the Unitarian Universalist context. If you don’t know, UU’s have always tried to meet social problems in a straightforward (no implications), rational (Unitarians), and compassionate (from the Universalist side) way. The problem has always been to serve both the interests of the individual and the whole society, or at least the whole denomination. It’s rough. But slavery, discrimination, Vietnam, homosexuality, transparency, and AIDS have all been addressed at the expense of popularity-based growth.
This fellow minister was in a committed relationship and his partner was an MD. His congregation knew everything. When we were in denominational meetings together (UU ministers are so scattered that they don’t usually see each other except at conferences of some kind), we were all reminded of his virus infection because he carried a fancy pill box that beeped every time he should take a pill. Often. In the end his virus killed him. Not his homosexuality, not his behavior, not his lack of treatment, but simply the fact that he caught this disease before there was a real cure for it or a vaccine against it.
Because of “walking along” with Cinematheque (I put it in quotes because some people have gotten confused over whether I’m ever in the physical presence of these people, but I’m not.) I’ve gotten interested in AIDS issues the same as realizing the ubiquity of closed-skull injuries in my birth family. One of the similarities is the issue of how much our behavior is the product of intention and how much is due to complex brain functions that can skew and confuse intention. One of the problems with AIDS is that even with powerful antiretrovirals that make the molecules undetectable, they still lurk in brains and bones, bouncing back at the first opportunity. (There are social parallels, but that’s another blog post.) The assumption in treating AIDS is that it’s like cancer, a disorder of the cell molecular coding, and the meds for AIDS were originally researched as cancer cures. The idea is to come as close to killing the good cells as possible -- even losing a few -- in hopes of killing the slightly more vulnerable bad cells.
This is, of course, cell profiling in parallel to social profiling and deadly to the outliers. The “outliers” can vary from huge percentages of the population of countries like South Africa to “free radical” kids on the streets of any big city to people who can’t afford even the antiretrovirals that are available and produced in quantity. I don’t know anyone in the Valier area or on the Blackfeet Reservation who has AIDS or even positive HIV. I know a few of my former students have died of it. But the stigma is still high. There are people here who still hush up cancer and diabetes. Disease to them is punishment from . . .well, some mysterious entity. Or even the inevitable result of taboo behavior. They cling to these ideas for the sake of the feeling of control.
The two most prevalent and deadly afflictions here are diabetes and drunk driving, both of them behavior-based. People do NOT stop eating or drinking as they know they ought. This is because of denial. When people want something bad enough, they deny all cautions and consequences. Many of the Cinematheque boys wanted to stay alive on the street, and for that one needs money and there is one thing kids can always do for money. (They have an unlimited supply of denial, which they need on the street, but part of Tim’s work is getting them to give it up enough to change.)
AIDS is not a kid disease or a male disease or a sex disease. In the way I’ve been taught, I look for information and I’m told that half the people infected with HIV now are female and that it is shifting into the IV drug user population. Prevention now means condoms and needle exchanges. Both get blocked by the stigma that attends sex and illegal drugs, so drug abuse has also shifted to legal prescription drugs. Things are happening fast. Narcotic suckers and patches are barely mentioned, but they float around the households of all cancer sufferers and there are plenty of those. Enough to get medical marijuana legalized so they can tolerate chemotherapy.
Today the Great Falls Tribune has a story about “budding scientists” and features a photo of a handsome young man participating in the Amgen Scholars Program who is a junior at the University of Great Falls. His goal is finding a vaccine for AIDS. You might think that a student in a small Montana university (run by nuns) is unlikely to make a major contribution. But consider that Montana is the location of major labs researching viruses like rabies, Rocky Mountain fever, bubonic plague, hanta virus, and West Nile virus. They are all invasive “codes” that gum up the functioning of cells. Probably cancer is included. We’re past thinking that cancer is contagious, but we know that messing with cell chromosomes makes the controls go haywire. “Messing” includes all sorts of things from pesticides to radioactivity to stress.
Pushing back means using the arts. I’m not able to write a Broadway play like “Angels in America.” I’m not in the formal ministry anymore. I’m not about to go looking for people around here with HIV. But I can make a little figure to remind people that people with AIDS/HIV include boys.
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