WORLD AIDS DAY

"[I]t could be argued that the real moral and political challenge of ecology may lie in accepting that the world is not about to end, that human beings are likely to survive even if Western-style civilization does not. Only if we imagine that the planet has a future, after all, are we likely to take responsibility for it."

Paul Corrigan

Decades ago when I was a Unitarian minister, I had attended a workshop in Calgary and was returning to Saskatoon, the congregation I was serving.  The temp was maybe thirty degrees below zero fahrenheit.  The sun set in a lurid red sky about the time I passed the Sand Hills, which the old-time Blackfeet thought was where the shades of the dead roamed.  More than a foot of snow on the ground was bermed by plows several feet high at the shoulders.  Few headlights felt their way along the slick roadway.

My old van stopped and refused to restart.  I put on the blinkers and coasted to the side.  No one stopped.  After a long wait I tried to restart with no luck.   Again.  Again.  The traffic was thinning even more.  I got out and raised my arm to each car.  None stopped.  I was wearing long johns under jeans and three layers of fleece and flannel topped by a “rancher’s coat” of down and a sheepskin helmet.  No car stopped.  The cold knifed through all layers.

Finally, desperate, I jumped out in front of the next car.  It barely stopped in time but for a moment the driver wouldn’t unlock the door.  When I could get in, he was very angry but he did take me to the next town.

That next Sunday I preached about this, saying it was a metaphor for AIDS.  You are in mortal danger, you badly need help, and no one will stop.  The congregation was stony-faced.  They had enough trouble of their own. 

The first person I knew for sure had AIDS was one of the most promising and handsome young Unitarian ministers in Canada, a natural leader from a family of Unitarian ministers.  At meetings we were very aware of his status because he had a pill dispenser that dinged to remind him of his complex med protocol.  And we were aware of the basic facts about HIV, liberal enough to hug Mark without restraint.  But some people quietly sat at a distance from him.  In spite of his partner being a doctor, Mark died.

In the last few years, through my co-writer Tim Barrus, I’ve gotten acquainted with an assortment of boys in Europe who have HIV.  Some of them have died.  I do not have HIV.  I do not have sex, which doesn’t mean I couldn’t catch HIV, one way or another, but I will not catch it through the Internet.  This group seizes my imagination but not because they are infected, staying alive only because of massive doses of extremely expensive meds which Barrus hustles for them.  Rather, I love them because they are fighters, they are artists, and they are hilarious. 

Tim escaped an abusive home in Michigan (class has nothing to do with abuse) to San Francisco just in time for the major Act-Up demonstrations demanding attention for what was then considered the “gay plague.”  Someone asked me recently where Tim’s age cohort friends were.  After a moment of reflection I had to say, “dead.”  He wrote a book about it called “Genocide,” which he says himself is Cormac McCarthy’s “The Road,” except without the sex.  (I’ve read it and I agree.)  As his cohort of gifted photographers, writers and artists died, he “made more casseroles than God,” and learned to be a nurse.

AIDS is nothing like any flu epidemic short of the pandemic that swept the world just after WWI and reduced the population of the prairies by ten per cent.  It is more like the smallpox that decimated Indians far more effectively than any of the skirmishes that young male historians love so much.  It is more like the Black Death that scythed the European population.  Deaths on that scale have huge political impacts.  Funding for AIDS meds can control the future fates of countries struggling to keep order and diplomats know it. 

The United States is not exempt.  Recession + lousy schools + the limits of a nation-state unable to manage borders effective against either population migration or international corporations + the end of social safety nets + mass evictions + drugs + grossly overloaded prisons + pandemic equals Singer’s “syndemic.”  The collapse of civilization -- apocalypse -- is continuous.  It happens in small pockets all the time, but we have not had people dying in the streets at the rate we might expect if this syndemic progresses.

No one knows what to do.  That’s part of the problem.  Blaming, stigmatizing, denying, withholding, balking, cause those on the edge to go on over to oblivion.  We fancy that’s okay, so long as we can maintain a mental image of the victims that justifies it.  The countries who kill their outcasts outright are probably more honest than California prisons that can’t provide basic health care, causing 112 deaths-while-in-custody in the last couple of years in spite of repeated court orders to find a solution.  When the rule of law is ignored, it’s the same as not having any.  But it is the key to democracy.

I don’t talk to a lot of people about AIDS because I don’t talk to a lot of people, period.  I write all day.  People say to me, surprised,  “Oh, I thought there were meds for AIDS and people could survive!”  If they can afford the meds, if they can withstand the nausea and fevers, if they have a support group, if they can evade the depression of living with a death sentence at age fourteen, if they can keep from succumbing to the ordinary infections and traumas of boy-life. 

And in the last few months, just as I thought I was getting the picture, I’ve learned about AIDS dementia, the infection of the brain, one of the few things that this retrovirus causes directly.  Usually death comes from not having any immune system.  AIDS dementia affects each brain differently: loss of memory, lack of judgment, confusion, sudden rages.  I see that our whole country has a chilling collective case of AIDS dementia, insanity about AIDS.  Who will stop for it?