RED RIBBON

Today is World AIDS Day.  It is an affliction that has thrown open the doors to the very cells of our body to say nothing of the dark heart of our society.  It has proven to us that the most obscure little monkey, the sooty mangabey, and the primate most like ourselves, the chimpanzee, are capable of carrying malfunction code out of the deep jungles of Africa in a way that challenges our survival.  All our hatred, fear, and walling off has only driven it into the children we neglect and exclude, revealing how the strong among us can be the most destructive, and asking whether we should play cards with the Devil of viral code when we haven’t even resolved the consequences of universal access to pixel code on the Internet.

I’m only a straight, celibate, scribbling old woman and I’m coming out -- not as infected with HIV, but as indignant about human behavior.  I call us to see that we are repeating the lessons of plague without learning anything more than how to throw the bodies over the wall, which we’ve already known since the diseases from domesticated farm animals swept through our lives ten thousand years ago.  There is more hiding in our blood than disease codes.  The future is sequestering in there as well, the Red Angel of our creating selves.