Wow. Ok, that kind of talk scares me. If he weren't my grandpa, and I heard someone on the radio or something say that, I'd immediately label them as crazy. You know, like Nazi-militia freak-radical-super conservative-religious fanatic crazy.
Let us ponder the issues of that statement for a monent. Firstly, AIDS is super bad. I mean, it sucks. It's transimitted in various ways, primarily via unprotected sex. And there's the sterotypes that only gays get AIDS, and if you're a druggie you'll get AIDS. Don't get me wrong, it can happen that way, but usually people associate AIDS only with those forms of transmission. Numero deux, people seem to think Africa = AIDS, black people = AIDS, moreover, black Africans = AIDS. Really, that's what they think, it's simple as addition. Tres, Religiously speaking (this is gonna come from a Christian worldview, but I'm quite sure remains true for other main world religions), AREN'T WE SUPPOSED TO HAVE COMPASSION ON THE HURTING, SICK, BROKENHEARTED, and LESS-FORTUNATE?? Right? Did I miss something? We provide for those who don't have. We share, we love, we give, we pray, we HEAL. That's what Jesus did....In fact, that's what he was all about. And # fo, this just sounds like that crazy Malthus guy, with his crazy Malthusian ideas, something about how we didn't have enough food in the world to feed everybody, so the undesirables would just die off for the betterment of the rest of us (us meaning, of course, Caucasian Judeo-Christian Western rich folk).
Ok. End rant.
Thoughts?
2 comments:
I agree. AIDS today has the taboo that leprosy had in Jesus' time. I think no matter what disease a person has or how they got it, we still have a responsibility to take care of them and have compassion on them. I've heard other people say crazy stuff about how AIDS is God's way of controlling the population in Africa and such, which is ridiculous. I think some of it is just ignorance about the disease itself, and part of it is that people think of Africa (or Asia or South America for that matter) as being so separate from our world. It's like people over there don't exist in the same world that we do, so we don't have to treat them the same way that we would want to be treated. Craziness. I guess some people would have to be really confronted with the disease or with the people who have the disease in order to really understand what they're going through, because just hearing Bono talk about it on the radio is not enough to make most people care about it.
Well said.
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