I was listening to NPR last Saturday and they were airing a program focused on World AIDS Day. There were lots of statistics and numbers being bandied about. One set of statistics that struck me is that, world-wide, 6000 people a day, every day, will die from AIDS and that 7000 people a day, every day, will become infected with the AIDS virus. Many times for me, those kinds of numbers and statistics are meaningless. I try to make sense of them, I try to put faces to numbers, but by lumping 13,000 people together like that, it becomes hard for me to imagine, let alone understand.
Perhaps, if we look just at those daily statistics through a different lens they can make more sense. There are 86,400 seconds per day: so every 14 seconds of every minute, of every day, someone in this world dies of AIDS. 14 seconds is represented by how long it took me to say that last sentence.... And that one: so two more people are dead. Every 12 seconds of every day, someone in this world is infected...someone just got infected. (Wait 12 seconds)....And another.
This kind of detailed breakdown still makes this world-wide crisis too far away from me to comprehend. To me these numbers, although important, are sterile and impersonal. I need more intimate and personal touchstones in order to relate to these numbers. One of the ways for me to do this relating is to think of the people I know, many of them dear friends, who have died of AIDS, as well as those friends and acquaintances who are HIV positive.
We are in our 26th year of this AIDS epidemic/crisis. That's a long time to live in crisis, which perhaps is one of the reasons we don't have screaming headlines about this as we should. This is a long time to live in crisis....I was in college in the late 70s and early 80s. We started to hear about a "gay disease" in my last years of college. For someone like me who at that time was not yet out of the closet this was a terrifying time. The news of this mysterious and deadly disease afflicting the gay community was one of the factors that kept me locked away in that closet for a number of years more until I was in my late 20s.
That was a terrifying time: one of uncertainty and concern and great loss....Loss of life, loss of friends, loss of community, loss of identity. It was a time of great stigma: if you lost weight people thought you were sick and dying, with many people shunning you. I remember in that time period I started working out and dieting and dropped about 20 pounds. My friends who were gay, who knew I was gay even though "we didn't talk about it", were worried. My straight friends who suspected I was gay (but again we didn't talk about it) would give me looks of concern when they weren't shying away from me.
