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Bad Math
07-8-04
Does
it strike anyone as strange that during the largest epidemic ever known
in the history of man, we squander our wealth and our manpower and our
ingenuity on fighting chimeric villains and non-existent enemies?
The UNAids agency reports that Thirty-eight million people around the
world are now living with HIV.
Five million new cases were diagnosed last year alone - the largest number
in any one year since the epidemic began.
Last year three million people died of AIDS across the world.
Depending on how you want to juggle your math, that means that the AIDS
epidemic is somewhere between a thousand and ten thousand times as serious
as the 9/11 tragedies in terms of human lives lost.
The current government in the United States, as well as its likely successors,
are leading the world in the wrong direction by basing their reason for
political existence on the fear generated by a spectacular piece of vandalism
in September of 2001 while ignoring the real terror that is loose in the
world.
Each time this globe rotates on its axis twenty thousand people die of
starvation.
The Poet's Eye sees that we are fighting the wrong enemies. While AIDS
and starvation ravage Africa and Asia, we spend a quarter of a trillion
dollars to fight useless wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and just a few paltry
billion to fight the genuine and persistent killers, AIDS and starvation.
Wars on disease and starvation and ignorance don't have nearly the romantic
cachet as wars on evil, eccentric terrorists and dictators and mythical
deadly weapons. Apathy is a weapon of mass destruction. We worry about
having enough flak jackets for our soldiers before we worry about healthcare
for our poor.
Across the board, our political and civic leaders were like deer in the
headlights after 9/11. Most of them were savvy enough to know that the
political landscape had changed. The Bush administration was quick to
capitalize on the situation. They set the agenda that would define this
nation's course for the next several years. It was based on fear. They
crammed the Patriot Act down our throats. They took us into senseless
wars. The neo-cons counted on the notion that Americans had watched enough
James Bond movies to go for the idea that an evil genius with a mysterious
organization and millions of dollars at his disposal could be a threat
to our whole way of life. We could call it S.M.E.R.S.H. or C.H.A.O.S.
or even Al Queda.
War has no glamor unless you have an Evil Genius or a Cruel Tyrant or
a Corrupt Ideology against which to fight. Each individual death from
AIDS is not as vocal or telegenic as the deaths of 9/11. As Josef Stalin
said, "Ten thousand deaths are a statistic. One death is a tragedy."
But you would think that 38 million victims would qualify as a significant
enough threat to warrant a D-Day invasion of sorts.
The Bush administration pats itself on the back for paying lip service
to the AIDS epidemic to the tune of a few billion dollars over the next
five years, while at the same time they make it difficult for generic
anti-retroviral drugs to be made available in Africa because they are
beholden to the large drug companies who seek to protect their patents.
If the dope companies have their way, a year's supply of anti-retrovirals
will cost $11,000 instead of the the $200 per year for which they can
be provided by less rapacious vendors.
It's very akin to hypochondria, the way Americans can imagine creeping
diseases like cancer and communism and terrorists to be lurking in their
ventricles. They will purchase all manner of remedies including ones containing
opium to fight the imagined ailment. This is a case where the medicine
is worse than the disease, because it ignores the disease.
The Poet's Eye sees that the real terrorists--AIDS, lack of adequate healthcare,
starvation, poor water--will eat our lunch while we are occupied with
the ghosts and mosquitos that our leaders ask us to chase.
From love's first fever to her plague, from the soft second
And to the hollow minute of the womb,
From the unfolding to the scissored caul,
The time for breast and the green apron age
When no mouth stirred about the hanging famine
--Dylan Thomas
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