Back in the late 80’s there was this idea to send all the people that had AIDS to an island so they could live together in perfect harmony (can we say “Leper Colony”?). I remember thinking that it wasn’t such a bad idea at the time, remember thinking that all the infected people would have a good time and not worry the rest of the world. I’m glad my feelings on this have changed.
It is clear to me that I had never really thought what such segregation and isolation might mean, and had someone romatisied the idea of an island paradise on which to die. It seems that I’m not the only one to have changed, somewhere along the way the idea was simply dropped, never to be mentioned again. Kind of a global social faux pas. Best forgotten.
Strange that I should think about this now, there is no obvious reason for these thought to surface. Somewhere over the years my thoughts and feelings changed in a big way, but there was no big cataclysmic event to cause the change, its a subtle process.
The fear and uncertainty that was the publics initial reaction to the AIDS threat has gone, replaced not with understanding and acceptance but instead replaced with ambivalence and uncaring. This is a bad thing. The knee-jerk reaction of “It could never happen to me because I’m not gay!” has been replaced with the simpler yet more insidious “It could never happen to me!”.
People have grown too accustomed to this danger, and have dropped their guard.
Perhaps we have a need for extreme right-wing rhetoric after all?