Guess what?
I hate world AIDS day.
I hate the compression of empathy into a 24 hour period. To really understand AIDS you have to get this simple fact through your skull- there is not a single day that is not 'world fuckin' AIDS day'. If you compartmentalize, taking annual notice December first then slumber on through 'til next December you don't know a damn thing about AIDS.
I hate 'they live as long as you remember them'.
Because my friends are not alive- no matter how much I remember them. That's what AIDS really means, and no amount of the endless wallowing in our second hand 'stories', or 'prayers', etc can ever fix that simple reality- that those we loved are really gone, and are not 'alive'.
I'm sick of it.
I'm sick of the annual ritual- lighting candles and reading names, and all of it.
Tears, and 'prayers' and candle wax mean so little in the face of not just who and what we've lost, but who and what slips through our fingers every minute of every day due to this obscene plague.
The institutionalized annual rituals like a 'stories' diary on Dkos coming around just like clockwork on Dec. 1rst just exaggerate the 364 day silence those living with AIDS and dying of AIDS endure. So once a year like a pressure valve being released, a few trickles, leak across, and a great exhale takes place as people talk about what finding they were positive was like, or we take a little space to remember those now gone.
But that's not what AIDS is.
AIDS and the world we now inhabit because of it, is perhaps the defining aspect of my generation. What the disease has done to people we care about, communities we live in, countries yes even far from us, and how it has affected our most basic relation to our own sexualities and pleasure- how we touch, and don't touch- who we open our lives and our hearts to, and who some don't dare- AIDS has touched every part of that- unless of course, your either an idiot or in denial.
AIDS in America has been swept away under language like 'manageable' or 'close as he can come without being cured'- rendered even more invisible, something I never imagined possible back in the '80's. AIDS in some other parts of the world isn't invisible, it's all around you.
But we don't see, and we don't get angry, and we hold our polite cutsie little 'remembrances' that give everyone their catharsis- until next December when they get to pull their treasured photos out and allow themselves to feel for 24 hours before putting the photos back.
No, we don't rage, we don't point fingers at those systematically gutting access to condoms and sentencing people to a premature death, no that would be impolite. We don't lift our fingers to honor our dead other than to type at a nice safe keyboard. (For those of you who do do more, clearly I'm not talking to you at the moment, feel free to read on.) Simple, basic, ordinary things like condom usage are slipping away in terms of access, public policy, and foreign policy- but apparently we're all too busy to even think about that, other than December 1rst.
Shall I get personal? Sure why not. The last damn thing the world needs is some stupid red ribbon poster with tears and famous dead people. If you want to give money to AIDS services, just do it- don't wait for some disempowering whiney poster. People with AIDS shouldn't have to wait for you to be 'asked' and you get something in return before you pry open your wallet. But that's just me. My diary, my opinion.
People come on Dkos and whine 'we need the next ACT-UP, maybe we can get those guys (And gals!) outta retirement'. And no, I'm not kidding.
The complacent shit I see around here? Many of today's 'activists' aren't worthy of wearing my dead pal's leathers, let alone stickers, least of all the red paint.
I sit here looking at massive threads contemplating the pros and cons of an Obama run for the presidency. You know, the sort of democrat who feels it's important to reach out to AIDS evangelism marketing leeches like the Rick Warrens and Sam Brownbacks of this world. You know, the same folks who think jesus and abstinence must replace condom distribution. The nonsensicality of people posting the pictures and stories of our AIDS dead in one thread and then cheering on Obama in the next is not lost on me. Nor would it have been lost on my dear dead friends.
Because when it's personal and the clock is ticking many folks just don't have time or lifespan for the bullshit. And that's what this kind of Dem: one hand mourning and preying and crying around and around in circles over our dead all the while working with the anti-needle exchange, anti- condom, anti-sex assholes is- nonsensical.
I'd call it pitiful, but too many people just don't have time or energy to waste dwelling on the stupidity and patheticness of it.
Mainly, I, at least, should just shut up- and let those living with it speak for themselves.
It would be nice if Dems had half a clue, but they don't.
So for the next 45 minutes- enjoy yer fucking world AIDS day.