I was off work sick today and I had the chance to listen to my favourite Australian music station, Triple J, over the internet. Each weekday afternoon they have a half-hour current affairs program called “Hack“.
Today there was an interesting segment about the increase in rates of HIV. You should go and download the program and listen to it (click here and look for Friday’s streaming audio. Of course, if you’re reading this after December 3 2007, you’ll need to go to the archives link at the top and see if this story is in there somewhere. Sorry!) It probably runs for about 6 or 7 minutes and the segment I’m referring to is in the middle of the show.
There is reference at the beginning to “the grim reaper ad”, which may have been lost on many of the younger listeners today, and may be lost on you if you weren’t watching Australian television in the 80s. So I’ll give you a quick rundown. This ad was, I seem to recall, actually pulled after a rash of complaints that they were too scary and upsetting for some people.
Here it is. I hadn’t seen it for many, many years and although it’s certainly dated in some ways (such as the use of the word “gays”), the effect is still the same. For all its melodrama, it stills packs a punch for me somehow.
The details say it was screened in 1987, but I seem to recall it being earlier than that. I thought I was in Grade 5 or 6 at elementary school. Seems I was wrong; in 1987 I was in first year of high school.
[Note: high school in Australia is from ages 13-18, generally at the same school. We don’t really have any sort of formalised national “middle school” system. We do have some “senior high schools” for 17 and 18 year olds, but mostly, “high school” in Australia means ages 13 to 18 at the same school.]
So, I was probably 12 or 13. I don’t think I was really old enough to understand what HIV was. I knew what sex was, of course, but I’m pretty sure I didn’t realise that anything bad (apart from unplanned, teenage pregnancy) could happen from having sex. So I guess the message was lost on me until we actually started learning about these things in Health Education class (or whatever it was called). And when I did, those images of the bowling alley came back to me quite vividly.
So, anyway, on Hack today there was an interview with a bloke who was one of the senior advisors to the Minister for Health at the time. It’s a little promo piece for a doco called “Rampant” that screens this coming Monday night on Australian tele about the rise of the HIV epidemic in Australia in the early to mid 80s. I’d quite like to see it, but I live in Japan.
You can check rates of HIV infection in other parts of the world by going to the World Health Organisation’s website. In Australia rates are definitely on the rise again and as the guy in the interview says:
one of the paradoxes of good prevention programs is
that after a while people start to become complacent.
December 1 2007 (tomorrow as of the time of writing) is World AIDS Day and you can read a statement (rubber-stamped) by the Secretary General of the UN here. There is also a statement by Dr Peter Piot, the Director of UNAIDS here. And, finally, there is a Fact Sheet by Region with some interesting information. One thing was that injecting drug use is a contributing factor in the Arab world, which for some reason I wouldn’t have expected. Not sure why, but it came as a surprise.
If you would like to make a donation, there are plenty of HIV/AIDS organisations out there, of course.
Some people might be less sympathetic, however, thinking that those infected were foolish enough to, say, have unprotected sex and therefore have to accept the consequences of their actions.
This I happen to partly agree with this. It’s not the same as saying, though, that they “deserved it”. That’s total rubbish. And about as mean-spirited and spiteful as a person could possibly be.
One of my favourite topics/rants is “Taking responsibility for your life”. We make certain decisions and we have to deal with their consequences. Fact.
We can blame other people. We can blame other things. We can blame circumstances.
And, yeah, sometimes things are really NOT under our control. That happens. And when something bad results, that’s particularly shitty. But most of the time we DO have control over the situations–or at least control over whether to put ourselves INTO situations where we know we might be relinquishing some or almost all of our control. And if we choose to go ahead, then we can’t really say “Well, it was out of my control!” If you had a choice to be in that situation or NOT be in that situation, and you chose to be there… You see where I’m going with this.
Not that this point is specifically connected to HIV/AIDS. It’s just a general comment about life.
The thing about HIV, though, is that it can affect lots of people who really DIDN’T do anything bad or wrong. And that’s more than a bit shit. Like people who become infected from their spouse because their spouse had an affair, or went to a prostitute, or shared needles, or whatever.
That’s really horrible, that is. These people (mostly women) are handed a death sentence with no input whatsoever. It’s not like they made a dumb decision. Their PARTNER, the person they supposedly trust enough to be in a relationship where condoms are no longer necessary, does something that then affects them both.
This is the thing that’s really awful about HIV as far as I’m concerned.
Maybe you’re reading this and you’re HIV positive because you didn’t have safe sex or you shared needles. Does that mean I think you “deserved it”? Does it mean that I think you should die? Of course not.
But to be completely honest, I can only say that I have empathy for how awful it must be to live with such a thing day in day out. But in reality I can’t even begin to imagine what it’s like. It must be awful. So it’s great to see people who say “Hey! I’m not going to let this beat me! I’m gonna get out there and live life to the full!” instead of just giving up.
But I can’t honestly say that I am sympathetic. You made the decision to have unsafe sex or to share needles, knowing full-well that you might get HIV, but you went for the short-term payoff (pleasure in the moment) and risked the long-term consequences (your health). It’s almost like gambling, in a way. Or Russian Roulette. I’ve heard it compared thus many times.
It’s harsh, I guess. And there are millions of people who probably think I should be more compassionate. Well, re-read the last two paragraphs. I am compassionate insofar as I think it’s truly, truly horrendous a thing to live with. And the psychological pain must be terrible. I really feel for people in that situation when I think about how awful it must be. The situation elicits my empathy.
But I still maintain that taking responsibility for your own life is no one else’s business but your own. We make our beds, we lie in em. There doesn’t need to be anything mean-spirited about that point of view at all.
The sooner people start taking responsibility for their own actions (and beliefs and modes of thinking for that matter), the sooner people will stop feeling like victims when they are only “victims” due to their own choices.
Sometimes people truly ARE victims. I am not addressing those things in our lives where we really were victimised. But if we look at all the instances where we think we are/were the victim, we’ll find that only in a very few of them can we really say that this is the case. In all others, we made decisions to do–or more often than not, NOT do–something and certain consequences ensued.
Another thing about this, though, is whether the message is actually getting through to people or whether everyone has just become too complacent. I find it hard to imagine that most high school kids wouldn’t know about HIV and other STDs, but maybe they don’t.
And access to condoms, well! We’ve had several big uproars about that in Australia over the years. Schools have tried to introduce condom vending machines into toilets and I think they have been overruled by the PTA every time. I can only imagine (because I don’t have any proof whatsoever for this assertion) that the primary grounds were religious ones. I’ve heard the same old argument many, many times before: “If we talk openly about sex and make condoms available, then we will be seen to be condoning sex before marriage.”
Now, if we take the last bit, that’s MOSTLY (to be as fair as I can be to a religious point of view) because there is a wider social morality in most cultures that sex before marriage is a bit of a no-no. But I also think that in countries like Australia and New Zealand, and in the UK and Canada and the US and France and plenty of others that I can think of where the religious police are not part of the government, that this point of view is really only paid lip-service in most cases.
Everyone (and I mean that quite literally) knows that a HUGE number of people–probably the overwhelming majority of people–lose their virginity before they are married. This is not the same as sleeping with 50 or 100 different people before you’re married.
You only need to have sex ONCE to get HIV.
But remove the religious zealots from the equation and you would probably still have a large contingent of the PTA arguing not to put condoms in the toilets and not to teach kids about sex in class. And the only reason I can possibly think of here is that they would be concerned, again, that they would be condoning sex.
Weird point of view. Totally fallacious. Clearly.
And are parents so naive that they think their kids don’t actually know what sex is? I knew what sex was (and basically how to “do it”) looooooooong before I really understood what it was all about (and I just mean that physically, not any of the emotional aspects either)!
Don’t you think that’s pretty dangerous? For kids to “more or less” know what sex is, but not really understand the full implications of their actions?
Duh! Seems like a no-brainer to me.
“But, uh, Leslie, if we talk about it, then kids will think that WE think it’s okay for them to just get about like rabbits”
Okay…
So how do you deal with Arnie mowing down hoards of people with semi-automatic weapons on the tele, or Mel punching someone in the face, or Dan Akroyd creating the biggest multi-car pile-up Detroit has ever seen?
Alright, these are facetious examples. But how about the crack house in your suburb? Or the date-rape of your local prom queen? Or the stabbing of a service station attendant in your town?
Clearly these things come up over the dinner table, or while you’re out for a walk, or fishing, or doing the ironing together or whatever…
Is talking about these issues–which clearly do need to be talked about, right? Right?–is talking about them condoning drug use, date rape, or first degree murder, respectively?
But, “Oh, no, we can’t talk about sex and teen-pregnancy and STDs because kids might see that as the green-light to go hog-wild!”
Every parent KNOWS that their kids don’t need no freakin green light to have sex. They will do so when they’re good and ready, whether that’s when they’re 15 or 25.
I thought parents wanted the best for their kids. Weird, huh?
“As a parent, what I’ll do is say that I have your welfare and best interests at heart, but what I’ll do is choke off any information that you might get that could, in fact, help you to make responsible decisions…”
And if you’re reading this and you can POSSIBLY disagree with the position I’m taking there, then I can only think it’s by using the old “I’m doing it to save your eternal soul” defence. Which begs the question: So you’d rather see your child go through incredible suffering in this life, and die much earlier than he or she otherwise would have (accidents and other random diseases aside)? Yes, I understand that this life is only one, whereas eternity is by definition forever. But, really. This kind of thinking, to my mind, is just plain sick.
Oh, and if you’d be so kind as to not leave comments to this post saying stupid shit like “AIDS is God’s punishment for being gay!” or any other ridiculous, bigoted spewings, that would be great. In this space, you’re like droids in the creature cantina.
Here’s to your health!
Leslie
