Melville Cooke, Contributor
YESTERDAY WAS World AIDS Day, with the attendant deluge of information about the disease, prevention strategies (which are quite simple strap up before mounting up) and pleas to be sympathetic towards those who have HIV/AIDS.
It is the last component that strikes me the most, the fact that people who have HIV/AIDS are often shunned by family and suddenly former 'friends', even chased out of their communities and dismissed from their jobs. (I do, however, strongly resent the attempt to link discrimination against people with HIV/AIDS with sodomy laws. There is absolutely no law against putting on a condom now, is there?)
PANIC REACTION TO HIV/AIDS
For me, it is incomprehensible that a human being would reject another totally and even abuse them verbally and physically because they have HIV/AIDS. The flu is more catching, for crying out loud. That can be passed through sneezing, coughing, breathing, the works, while an HIV infection comes only through extremely intimate contact that involves unprotected sexual contact, as well as sharing needles.
(On the latter point, shooting up drugs in Jamaica is nowhere near as common as the etching of tattoos in the skin. The tattoo parlours are unregulated, the tattoo artists, as far as I know, stick by day and night operators. It seems to me that it is a hell of a good way to pass on HIV.)
So, unless you are planning to have unprotected sex with a person who has HIV/AIDS, there is absolutely no way you can get infected by them.
It is not air-borne, so living beside an infected person and wanting them out of the community is an even more ludicrous situation than at the workplace. And unless a healthy dose of incest is in the offing, family members booting out those who have HIV/AIDS is simply lunacy.
So I have tried to figure out why this panic reaction to people with HIV/AIDS and, in my own little world of petty psychology, have come to the conclusion that it is because it is death from the act that creates life.
It is the ultimate irony, one that passes without much comment in all the statistics and strategies, that the very act that is primarily designed for reproduction (not pleasure, despite what the concentration of nerve endings down south tells us) can lead to the finality of death.
That finality is, I believe, also a factor in the treatment meted out to persons living with HIV/AIDS. (I hate the terms 'AIDS sufferers' and 'AIDS victims'. They have a particular condition which anybody can get and which they live with and can function quite normally until the end stages; a 'victim' and a 'sufferer' has a condition that automatically eliminates them from normal day to day activities).
There is no cure, so those who think they do not have HIV/AIDS can feel secure in ill-treating those who do, as the person they scorn or beat will not be suddenly well again one day.
It is further ironic, though, that many people who speak blithely of 'dem people deh' have HIV themselves, something that they may or might not find out before they die.
It is estimated that 12,000 people in Jamaica are living with the disease and do not know yet. That is 12,000 persons multiplied by the number of persons they are having unprotected sex with, times the number of persons those persons are having unprotected sex with - and it goes on and on. Heck, in this day and age it almost seems possible to catch HIV/AIDS from yourself. Herpes is also incurable and transmitted through sex, but it does not carry the stigma that AIDS does because life goes on.
OVERCOMING THE STIGMA
For us to overcome the stigma of HIV/AIDS, I believe that in the long run we need to be more comfortable with ourselves and sex (not sexuality; there is a difference). It is a normal, healthy, and under the right circumstances, extremely pleasurable part of life. If sex is mysterious, than HIV/AIDS will be too. And mysteries are to be feared.
In the short-term, legislation with teeth against people who discriminate against those living with HIV/AIDS, along with very public prosecution against those who breach the law, is needed.
It is not enough to try somebody for assault in a case where they attack someone with HIV/AIDS. It must be specified that HIV/AIDS is at the root of the matter. A hate crime is a hate crime.
Melville Cooke is a freelance writer.
