AIDS, HIV, Stigmas, and World AIDS Day

AIDS, HIV, Stigmas, and World AIDS Day

If nothing else, we have to admit that we are truly blessed with a president who, much like Bill Clinton, feels our pain–even as he inflicts it and hopes we don’t notice.

At the risk of overly-parsing presidential words, a small risk when the words are those of the silver-tongued, opaque Barack Hussein Obama, the following is one view of a recent presidential proclamation and its residual consequences.

With over a million people now suffering in the United States from the scourge of Acquired Immuno Deficiency Syndrome, A.I.D.S., an additional 56,000 being infected annually, and another million afflicted with the Human Immunodeficiency Virus, HIV, according to the Centers for Disease Control, President Barack Obama’s 2010 World AIDS Day proclamation commemorating that occasion was illustrative of how he feels our pain, inflicts much more pain, and trusts in God or Allah that no one will notice the latter.

Obama urged that “attention and leadership” be devoted to the scourge, that Americans join in “appropriate activities” to remember the victims of A.I.D.S., and recommitted the U.S. to fighting the disease, preventing its spread, and finding a cure, all admirable words and commendable goals.

However, Obama’s reference to “combating the stigma and discrimination” associated with HIV/AIDS slipped into the realm of the very peculiar in that it suggests that Americans not suffering from those mostly sexually-transmitted diseases ignore the existence of the disease in those who are infected as if we were all Mother Theresas or Father Damians. It also suggests some heretofore undisclosed, built-in American immunity.

That is not an attempt to intimate that Americans should shun or discriminate against the sufferers but rather to say that to ignore their afflictions is to ignore the very real potential of encouraging healthy people, through empathy or ignorance, to contract A.I.D.S. or HIV perhaps by engaging in the same, unsafe sexual activities that caused the illness.

After all, if there’s no “stigma,” which, in the case of A.I.D.S./HIV should connote grave, mortal danger, perceived by others, especially by the young, why bother avoiding it? (Those who would dismiss living on the edge like that must not know any teenagers.)

Our president has already proven his mettle in this matter of eliminating stigmas. . .
(Read more at http://www.genelalor.com/blog1/?p=2904)