Feb 8, 2007 0
credit where credit’s due
one of the most powerful things the nightmare that is HIV/AIDS can do, probably within our lifetime, is to force the world to realize that the old paradigm that describes the agents which cause mass ideological shift in the entire world has become stagnant and needs revision. the past however many centuries human agents have been responsible for causing the ideological revisions: once upon a time there was a zoroaster and he said something about monotheism and the world changed. once upon a time there was a jesus and he had some books written about him and the world changed. once upon a time there was a mohammed and he wrote a book and the world changed. once upon a time there was a marx and a hegel and they wrote a manifesto and the world changed. and so on and so on.
not to sound overly zealous, but within this generation there has to be a realization that once upon a time there was a virus called HIV and despite it being a dead thing, it has done more than any human agent ever in the history of the world to expose an underbelly of humanity that at once conceals all the ways in which humans are responsible for the deaths of millions of other innocent humans. this is something that transcends ‘named’ activism. it’s overwhelming to accept that something as microscopic as a virus can create 40 million orphans in the ‘developing’ world, or that poor women in india contracting the virus will soon become a foregone conclusion. HIV has managed, in only the last decade or two, to lay bare all the world’s injustices for all to see. but HIV isn’t the problem, as therapy exists and it works. the problem is poverty. sexism. arrogance. the idea that to provide intravenous drug users with support somehow promotes rampant drug use. or that to encourage safe sex somehow promotes depravity.
HIV’s got a lot more in store for us and by all ‘educated’ guesses, the worst is yet to come.
