I was such a jerk... *sips hot tea* I still am a jerk, but as least there is one less thing for me to be a jerk about. Let me explain. This morning my perspective changed. It was sometime before 1AM and I was checking my email account. I hadn't checked it in about a week. I had an email that just came in and it was from an old friend -now just a contact- I hadn't seen, heard from or had any recent information on her in around two years. She's not the kind of girl to write without purpose see, so when I realized it was a forward, I was absolutely shocked. It was a letter on AIDS and it had a link: www.lighttounite.org Apparently you light the candle and a dollar is donated by whoever to someone. I just hope the money goes to someone who's fighting AIDS. So you light the candle... No, go ahead and light it, I promise your computer won't blowup and I will wait... *sips warm tea* and a few dozen off-white candles appear in the background; each one a different story. You can go ahead and challenge me on it, but from start to finish [more candles appear as you go left or right with the mouse.] Each one is different. I can wait here while you read some. I really don't mind, just came back when you're done please. Here is when things change for me. I'm not sure about you, but when I thought about AIDS, the first thing that came to mind was unprotected sex and some god-forsaken idiot who shagged a monkey in Africa and started the whole bloody thing. FYI, they have found the troop of primate where the disease originated and yes, it is in Africa. Sorry to disappoint. At any rate, my thoughts were negative but in actuality, it is what seems to be driven home and reinforced to us all the time (the unprotected sex thing, not the monkey shagging.)This is so much so the case that the natural course of progression leads us to believe that AIDS is usually a disease of the willful or careless. Now there are statistics, some on that site, that do support that conclusion, but I eventually realized that the people who are forgotten are the people who contract HIV through blood transfusions. It could be a child, or an infant, your grandmother, your teacher, your father, bestfriend, or aunt... it could be you. Now, I'd like to think that I'm a relatively well-informed person, a citizen who is not completely out-of-the-loop, though admittedly, me using that phrase may indicated otherwise. The point I'm trying to illustrate, is that they do teach us this in school, the fact that blood transfusions can very well cause an HIV infection. And most [I won't be so bold as to assume everyone] knows that this is the case. But is it possible that in our campaign to protect ourselves and other from contracting it carelessly, we've inadvertently downplayed and in some ways excluded the accidental cases of contamination; the real victims? I'll walk you through it. - Nobody wants to catch HIV sexually, in fact nobody wants anyone else to catch HIV sexually mainly because it's preventable. - So we begin campaigning for condom use to protect against it because it's mainly a STV. - In turn, a somewhat accurate social stigma is created about the disease. - As a result, generalizations are made about the victims. - Because of the negative image the victims are given, a lack of sympathy is created for all victims based on general facts, which seen through the public eye, is taken to be over-layingly true. - Thusly real victims are forgotten. I'll let that sink in for a moment... *sips lukewarm tea* Truth is that it happened to me. I let myself get hardened by campaigns designed to protect and inform. But all of that changed when I read just one paragraph, on that very site, about a little girl who died of AIDS which she contracted from a transfusion. The very process designed to save her life spelt her ultimate undoing. And she had no say in it. She didn't go have unprotected sex, or share crack needles with her druggie buddies. She's a real victim. And it's not that other victims are fake victims or deserving victims. Nobody deserves to die that way. I better qualify this before people start hating or annexing my journal. The thing is that she wasn't participating in an activity that would generally lend itself to being dangerous to one's health. She was going through a process that was going to save her life because she was losing and needed blood. It's the difference between 'willful negligence' and 'accidental'. We learned this in law class folks. Maybe I'm being harsh here, but in my books, it's the difference between "Christ, what were you doing? I told you this might happen!" and "Good lord, she was truly innocent and didn't deserve that." So when I say real victim, that is what I mean - the truly innocent, the one who has to suffer through no direct or indirect fault of their own. Me, I'm guilty of forgetting about the real victims. My mind was only set on the people who have the disease but insist on having intimate relations and in some countries, producing ready-born HIV-carrying children. In fact I was and still am a little upset at those kinds of people who continue to populate the world with diseased kids, children who don't stand a fighting chance. That's like giving birth to your first kid, know that you, as a parent will have to bury your child and every subsequent child you have but insist on having more children for the sake of self-gratification. Females who are raped, contract HIV and end up pregnant, you're true victims too, but for christ sake, don't keep on having children after you find out because then you're not better than the man who knowingly infected you. I'm not sure why I even said all of that, it's not as if there are many/any of the people in that situation who can speak english, have a computer, have access to the internet, will find SitD and then stumble upon my entry. Although if there were one of those who did, I mean what I say. All that aside, the fact is that I got caught up in the stigma... no, I let myself be effected to the point where it effected my judgement and decisions. That is a fact. Another fact is that I was disgusted with myself when I realized that. A fool was I. I actually believe my exact words were 'jerk.' Let me double check that. Yes, I was a jerk about this. So for all the times I withheld funds from AIDS charities because of my own prejudices and for the fact that all this time I held an inaccurate and unfair judgement about the victims and was blind to the people who really do need my support, I truly apologize. I was absolutely wrong. Not only did I become vulnerable to poor logic and use it as a weapon of ignorance and a blockade but I set a bad example by not uniting to support a good cause. I only hope that others can learn from my mistake and not make the same errors I've made. Drinking Iced Tea, - Captain B. Transformed