Not
On My Watch
Johnie H. Scott
(First printed in WAVE Newspapers, Wednesday, May 24, 2000)
In January of 2000, the United Nations Security Council met in a special emergency session that found then-Vice President Al Gore in attendance as head of the United States delegation. What made this Security Council session so special was the fact that the world’s superpowers were finally acknowledging a threat to civilization as it know it that seemed (and still does today) unstoppable: AIDS.
The Security Council came together to discuss ways of fighting this enemy that, every minute of the day, claims more and more victims. You know a threat has to be serious when the world’s superpowers – from Russia to Communist China to the United States – set aside political and religious differences to meet a common foe, one that is wreaking havoc everywhere with the worst days still ahead.
AIDS is claiming lives, lives now numbering in the millions. It is doing this without the benefit of bombs, planes, tanks, nuclear submarines, Cruise missiles, automatic weapons and chemical warfare. This nihilistic killer is crossing border after border, laying waste to all it comes into contact with, making no discrimination among men, women or children, rich or poor, educated or illiterate. It is an enemy that is remorseless and shows no mercy, with the Security Council acknowledging no means in sight for putting an end to the death and devastation being wrought worldwide by this pandemic.
Consider the facts about this enemy that were laid out on the table by the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) in its report titled The State of the World’s Children 2000:
“Each day 8,500 children and young people around the world are infected with HIV and 2,500 women die from AIDS. In 1998 alone, the number of women killed by HIV/AIDS was 900,000 – more than three times the death toll in the war in Bosnia (and, I might add, more than 15 times the number of U.S. servicemen lost in the Vietnam War!).”
The Report continues,” HIV/AIDS killed 510,000 children under the age of 15 in 1998. An estimated 1.2 million children under the age of 15 are living with HIV/AIDS. Young people (15 to 24 years old) make up the age group most vulnerable to HIV infection. More than 11 million are living with HIV. Five young persons are infected every minute, 7,000 every day, and in 1998, nearly 2 million were infected with HIV.”
I have to stop here. There is a social responsibility, it seems to me, that those of us with access to the facts have to our public. Let’s say, for example, you were coming to visit me. To do this, you were going to take the bus and asked me for directions. I told you what bus to take, the route it would cover, and the street where I lived so you would know when to get off.
You’re walking through the neighborhood to my home. So far, those directions I gave have been excellent. But I neglected to give you one very important fact: that on the block where I live, there also lives a very dangerous dog that’s a combination of pit bull and Rottweiler, a predator with a history of roaming the street and attacking anyone, especially those who come in not knowing what's going on or happening.
So while walking to my house, you meet up with this killer and the results, to say the least, are unfortunate. You never make it to my house. Instead, I get a telephone call from the nearby medical center stating that you have been taken there for emergency care after being savagely attacked and mauled by this same beast. The point is that I knew about the dog but neglected to tell you: Some kind of friend, right?
AIDS is the name of that animal and the neighborhood I live in, that we all live in, is called the world. Some of us might live in nations that are richer and more powerful than others. Some of us, here in Southern California, reside in tony neighborhoods that have nice homes, quality schools, in well-cared-for streets while others of us have to live in areas with streetlights that never worked, in substandard homes with poor plumbing, ill-equipped and underachieving schools, and streets in constant need of repair.
The beast named AIDS doesn’t care
where we live.
I’ve heard so many of my friends, when the issue of AIDS is brought up, go on the defensive. What they have to say seems to never vary: “You know the ‘Man’ created AIDS in a test tube to kill off Blacks and other poor people! It’s just another government conspiracy, and you should know that!”
Some of them will, to prove how knowledgeable they are, tell of how secret government testing took place at Fort Detrick, which is where the AIDS was first created before being introduced into the Black Community. Or, they’ll talk of how no sensible person will buy the racist “explanation” that Africans mated with the Rhesus monkey to spread the AIDS virus.
And then there are those who say, “None of this would matter if people stopped being promiscuous!” They utter this as though this present generation, in the turn of a heartbeat, is going to change its behavior from all the generations that came before. While all of this makes for heated, interesting conversation if you’ve nothing better to do. I now find myself at the point where none of that matters, nor do I find it particularly important.
What does matter is meeting that social responsibility. What matters, on this watch, is that I’ve been able to access information of the utmost importance to the populations that right this moment are clearly the most at-risk: people of color. What matters, right this minute, is getting that information out to you, the public, before it is too late.
The late Kwame Ture (aka Stokeley Carmichael, former chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and the person credited with developing the phrase and concept “Black Power”) was once asked while speaking in Harlem about his West Indian background.
The Civil Rights leader and activist replied, “The only difference between me and you, my brother, is the slave ship stopped at my country to drop off a shipment of Black slaves while on the way here!” Brother Stokeley’s point was that Africans and African Americans need to stop this petty bickering and in-fighting over where people come from – caused in the first place by a racial self-hatred leftover from 400 years’ worth of enslavement – to recognize the threat facing all of us.
The
Cards Are Face Up on the Table
The State of the World’s Children spells this out all so clearly: “In Africa, the social and economic devastation caused by HIV/AIDS in the last decade is greater than the combined destruction of the continent’s wars: an estimated 200,000 Africans, most of them women, died as a result of conflict since 1998 while 2 million were killed by AIDS. The pandemic wipes out families, villages, professions and age groups.
From country to county, it has marched through sub-Saharan Africa where 22.5 million people now live with HIV.”
If there is anything sensible about AIDS, it may be found in the fact that the world's superpowers seem to be awakening to the realization that unless something is done -- something major -- in a very short time, then we may just as well get ready to see the world in an entirely new light. What we see will not be pretty, not at all. This is not Johnie Scott the poet, or Professor Scott from the Pan African Studies Department at California State University, Northridge speaking. This is one person attempting to join with other concerned voices speaking out from those masses who are so very much at-risk. Going back to that little story I shared about the person who neglected to tell that visiting friend about the real menace to society prowling up and down the streets searching for new victims, I think it is important to close with the heartening note that the World Bank -- which is where much of the debate has to start -- is not sitting still.
Money is going to be needed and lots of it: money for research, money to help those African nations being torn apart by AIDS to pay for badly-needed medicines, money to help those families that have been totally disrupted by this disease which has claimed the lives of fathers,mothers, and children. But the World Bank is only a start and let's not confuse beginnings with endings. We all have a stake in this, and the sooner we get busy -- as our young people say -- then the better chance we stand to come out of this alive. And that, my friends, is the unvarnished truth.
(Note this article has been edited and revised from its original form with Internet links embedded to provide readers with the most current information available – JS)