Lucia

de Vernai

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August 11, 2008

Whatever Happened to the Liberal Commitment to Fighting AIDS?

The overwhelming coolness of inventive progressive cause campaigns is starting to wear off. Compared to the environmental chic craze even Wal-Mart cannot resist, the green trend has pushed the AIDS campaign red ribbon out of the center of public attention. As a capito-cause, the environment is much more sustainable – we still believe that buying specially marked boxes of cereal can save the polar bears.

AIDS has proven to be much less of a self-gratifying cause. Decades later, there is no cure, no feeling we are “making a difference” without reading about sexual violence and poverty, no cute stuffed animals to help explain to a six-year-old how AIDS kills.

Some organizations are changing their strategies for recapturing the public’s attention. The 17^th International AIDS Conference, held in Mexico City last week, addressed the need to update the message about the urgency of the AIDS epidemic as a global threat. One French group, A.I.D.E.S., created an ad campaign featuring various public figures to challenge the social perception of infected persons. The group presented their idea to Bill Clinton at the conference along with a poster of him captioned, “Would I ever have been the President of the United States if I were HIV positive?”

The group has named Barack Obama and Madonna as their next campaign targets. Although a provocative and ambitious campaign, its effectiveness in the United States may prove low. We like shiny, attention-grabbing, innovative media publicity stunts, mostly because they are just tricks to us. Like all other advertising, they are not meant to stimulate thought or reflection. And if there is nothing to consume, then they’re surely irrelevant.

Of course, if the A.I.D.E.S. campaign made it across the Atlantic, there would be a publicity stunt response on the part of the public as well. A nation of immigrants, of freedom and equal opportunity – as we love to remind everyone – we are not judgmental. Few people openly admit that they would not want a homosexual, a Muslim or an African American as a president or physician or babysitter. AIDS is no different, of course, since anyone who truly understands what it is knows that it wouldn’t matter, right?

This self-delusion of our righteous open-mindedness haunts our perception of domestic problems from Social Security reform to immigration policy, issues we may actually have a stake in. It’s no wonder that it’s easy to pay lip service to AIDS social consciousness – most of us don’t know anyone suffering from the illness, certainly very few have to interact with infected persons.

Then again, the collective shift away from the commitment to ending the AIDS epidemic cannot be explained by our lack of proximity. As interconnected as all creatures are, trading in fellow human beings in need for polar bears certainly does not account for it. Perhaps the green movement, still fresh and not well understood, offers the prospect of change and a hope for making an impact that the battle with AIDS no longer offers our short attention spans. When seeing Bill Clinton on a poster for a sexually transmitted disease turns into something more than a humor throwback to the ’90s, maybe we will be able to replace the desire for satisfaction with honoring obligation. 

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