Awareness Begins with You
Last month marked a milestone in the fight against HIV/AIDS as World AIDS Day was acknowledged yet again. Globally, people in many countries took a step back and realized how this epidemic affects everyone, including those not living with the disease. In an effort to completely eradicate this disease and the stigma associated with it, we must remember to continually educate ourselves and others.
Because there is no cure, education is the only realistic option available that will make stamping out this disease possible. A stigma is a mark of disgrace associated with circumstance and is expressed in many ways, from ostracism to avoidance and from mere rejection to outward discrimination, violence or quarantine. Stigmas inflict extra suffering on people living with AIDS who are already battling this incurable disease.
It's always been acceptable to laugh at a fear of the unknown. It is another thing entirely to laugh at a person who is facing the unknown. Charting our way through media history, we see how prevalent it is that those who suffer with HIV/AIDS have become the butt of jokes in television shows such as Family Guy and South Park. Jokes perpetuate stigmas. If we are okay with laughing at a situation, then we, as a society, must consider it to be normal to laugh at people in said situation. Laughing at persons living with AIDS directly interferes with attempts to fight the AIDS epidemic.
On the same day that a wall was broken down with the 30th anniversary of World AIDS Day, another wall was put right back up. Milton Hershey School officials denied a 13-year-old admission to their school based on his HIV status.
Then I remembered, education is ongoing. In order to eradicate the scourge that is HIV/AIDS, we must first remember that we all live and love in an era when HIV/AIDS is prevalent and most of us know someone living with or affected by HIV/AIDS. It is possible to look thirty years in the future and see a world where the stigma of being around a person with AIDS is non-existent, a world where everyone has educated themselves for the greater good of the people and such education eliminates not only the social hurt caused by stigma but the shame itself.
All it takes is education. Start with yourself.
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