HIV-AIDS IS A USEFUL METAPHOR

When I was a little kid, I thought a "social disease" was a kind of sociological phenomenon, something that made a social group uneasy.  It was close to WWII when Naziism was considered a disease, an aberrant destroyer of democratic civilization, for the benefit of a self-chosen elite.  I was right, but not quite in the way I thought.  The "anti-biotic" ("against life") was war.  It left seeds that have recurred.

Social diseases like STD's come from other people, getting from one body into another through contact.  I guess really all human-to-human transmission is either body-to-body or through a vector, often an insect like a mosquito carrying malaria from one blood system to another, or a bat carrying rabies from one blood system to another.  These are not human-to-human but rather mammal to mammal with insects as vectors.  You can't catch a disease that afflicts insects.  Usually, vectors only carry disease entities without being hurt, but just hurt mammals, like contagious killer infections from kissing turtles.

As I go through life, I begin to understand that society can produce vectors (other people) but also are sources of environmental disease and also auto-immune diseases that kill other humans.  This opens up a new field of metaphor.  What is the vector?  What is the "blood" that carries disease?  How does auto-immune operate?  (No one is really confident that we actually understand this "eating-yourself" phenomenon in humans.)  Are there social prions, the mis-folded molecules that can crowd out the effectively structured molecules?  Isn't extremism almost always auto-immune -- let alone blind self-righteousness?  In killing the disease (dark people) isn't it likely they will cause their own death?  I say yes.

For many people, the controlling metaphor for HIV-AIDS is leprosy.  You can catch it only if you come into close and repeated contact with nose and mouth droplets from someone with untreated leprosy. Children are more likely to get leprosy than adults.  Today, about 180,000 people worldwide are infected with leprosy.  It's Biblical, in the sense of being addressed in the Bible, but it's hardly a model for the present.

According to UNAIDS : "There were approximately 36.7 million people worldwide living with HIV/AIDS at the end of 2016. .. An estimated 1.8 million individuals worldwide became newly infected with HIV in 2016 – about 5,000 new infections per day."  Blood must be mingled to transmit the virus.  It is exceedingly resourceful, able to get into the brain -- not just the mass and fluid, but the cells -- and able to insert itself in the genetic array of the chromosomes.  It's a virus, which is simply molecular code, liberated and looking for a new cell.  Many mysteries must be solved before getting a grip on this retrovirus that has a grip on us.

Tim handles his relationship to HIV-AIDS partly like a rifleman and partly like a fisherman: that is, focused but with much strategy.  He has never forgotten the anguish of watching his beloved friends and co-workers die in the Eighties in spite of all efforts to help and even save them.  This dedication persists right up until now when he works with many groups, including "Let's Kick Ass," which serves long-term survivors of HIV-AIDS.  The only explanation for them growing old in spite of a deadly disease is their own intrinsic vitality and drive -- and maybe merely luck.  They don't give up. Truvada came along just in time.  But it's not enough.

I operate like flypaper -- going here and there, relating this and that, ending up all over the place, but sometimes relevant.  Always engaged, though I don't harbor this affliction nor does anyone close to me except Tim and the guys.  (Some are men now.)  But I have a grounding in social morality and ethics; I have a not-quite-scientific interest in sex and how it operates; and now I have a history with this group of valiant fighters.  All three make me a better writer, which is one of the goals on my list.  These justify my wide approach.

It's remarkable that though I was close friends with many gay men in undergrad years (Fifties), few have had to wrestle with AIDS.  Some are famous -- Marshall S. Mason, director of the NY production of "Angels in America", lost his partner, but is still active and vital.  These were disciplined men who did not reject women as friends.  

Only a few of my Blackfeet students are known to have died of AIDS.  They tend to be the most intelligent, most willing to reach out and experiment, and sometimes the most secretly tortured to the point of suicide.  Reservations are conservative places because only a few generations ago being a little bit flamboyant or questioning authority could get you killed.  Still can, just not by US Cavalry.  More likely, peers.

As I understand it, AIDS code inserted in the nuclei of a human body (or maybe that of a primate) can destroy the ability of that body to defend itself in the way the white blood cells and their immune system are meant to do.  This makes the victim susceptible to any hostile microbe that comes along.  When trying to think of the advantage to the retrovirus, all I get is that it would make primate victims get sick and fall out of trees so they can be eaten by others, which is why the "bug" lingers in tree-dwellers.  When humans butcher and eat primates, they ingest the retrovirus, which lets it survive.  Human attempts to help other victims can somehow create transfer, if blood mixing is involved, but ebola is much more resourceful, using all body fluids, not just blood.  But HIV can also travel in sexual fluids and persist in hypodermic needles.

The main ways to control and eliminate HIV-AIDS is limited to humans, because it can only be prevented by talking -- learning and teaching what to do.  Equipment like clean needles, antidotes like Truvada, the elimination of social stigma that can heal society, are vital to saving people.  

I repeat:  Naziism is a social disease, an autoimmune disorder.  There is a talking cure, just as there is for HIV-AIDS.