Tag Archives: disease

AIDS

Words from Dic(tionary)

dictionary with letter A

AIDS: (n) Acquired immune deficiency syndrome, a disease in which there is a severe loss of the body’s cellular immunity, greatly lowering the resistance to infection and malignancy.

Honestly, when the first reports came out on HIV, I didn’t take it very seriously.

Why? Because there’s always some new disease or bird flu they’re trying to frighten us with, to procure our listenership on some news broadcast.

Even when it was obvious that many people were contracting the disease, and famous folks like Rock Hudson were passing away, I still didn’t quite grasp the concept.

Truthfully, it was a little difficult to get past the “screamers.” You know what I mean by screamers, right?

You had the gay community, which insisted that no one cared because the disease was manifesting itself within their conclave.

And the Moral Majority, proclaiming it to be the “gay plague.”

So I don’t think the brunt of the reality of HIV and AIDS hit me until I received the phone call. It was a young lady who had performed in one of my plays years previously. She was in tears. She explained to me that she was HIV positive and was married to a man who was the same. The reason for her call, though, was that she had discovered she was pregnant and wanted us to pray that the baby would not be born infested with the virus.

Here in the confines of one family was nearly every conceivable way to contract this affliction. The girl had become infected by heterosexual sex, the man, through homosexual contact, and the baby was being threatened by merely exchanging blood with its mother.

Suddenly, the full impact and horror of the infestation was brought home to me. Even though all of these people I mentioned are still alive due to progress made with pharmaceuticals, my heart is always softened to the notion of a person touched by this horrendous condition when I remember the three of them.

Perhaps that’s the way we all are.

Until something jumps over our white picket fence and lands in our yard, we feel we can repel it or ignore it. I guess we can be critical of that, or we can be fully cognizant that God is no respecter of persons:

Just as blessing comes to all b… so does trial and the tribulation.

Affectionate

Words from Dic(tionary)

dictionary with letter A

 

Affectionate: (adj.) readily feeling or showing fondness or tenderness: e.g. a happy and affectionate family.

You gotta BE there.

It’s true, you know. There are some things in life that cannot be viewed, read, perused, discussed, debated or downloaded.

Affection is one of them.

In a climate where “lukewarm” has begun to feel “heated,” we lack such closeness and intimacy that it has caused us to become defensive with one another because we privately feel cheated of the tenderness we need to satisfy our souls, yet at the same time we push away personal overtures from those who try to get too close too quickly.

A lady warned me the other day, saying, “Watch out! I’m a hugger.”

I do remember attending a rock concert many years ago where complete strangers–thousands of them–came up to each other, hugging in groups of five and ten without explanation or apology. Yet to promote such an idea in our day and age would be cynically mocked as a “hippie philosophy,” a throw-back to olden times or impractical due to the spread of disease.

This culminated for me when I saw churches offering hand sanitizer to folks after they had the “passing of the peace.” I wish I had a profanity to express how upsetting that is to me. And please, spare me the explanation on why it is needed. I am fed up with the notion of what is needful and anxious for the pursuit of what is helpful.

  • I need affection.
  • I need to be affectionate.

Now, it doesn’t have to always be demonstrative, but it does have to be spontaneous and real. It can be reaching across a table and cutting up the banana of a friend who is making you coffee, or coring an apple for another friend so she doesn’t have to deal with stems and seeds.

When you lose affection in a society, you promote the idea of isolation. Once humans are isolated, there’s only one thing that takes hold–survival.

Is it possible that in the next decade we will begin to treat each other–all the time–like we do when we’re in a traffic jam?

Aeschylus

Words from Dic(tionary)

dictionary with letter A

Aeschylus: (c. 390 – 314 BC) Greek dramatist, best known for his tragedies Agamemnon, Choephoroe and Eumenides. Considered to be the father of the Greek tragedy.

Not only the father of the Greek tragedy, but also seemingly the parent of prime-time television and the movie industry of our present day.

After all, if we don’t insert some tragedy into the stories we tell, we risk some critic dubbing our tale “saccharine, cloying,” or worse yet–“family fare.”

There is a common aversion in today’s social strata against sharing a story with ups, downs, ins and outs, which ends up with a realistic conclusion instead of a Hollywood ending. Matter of fact, I think it would be impossible for the 24-hour news cycle to report anything that isn’t either sensational or able to be sensationalized.

And let me offer a tidbit of opinion which will probably grind the teeth of some of my readers: when there is a shooting at a school or a hurricane in the Gulf of Mexico, and we begin to hear the phrase, “death toll” introduced into the storyline, even though our better selves hope that people will not be killed, we sometimes might be a little disappointed when this running death toll does NOT rise.

We have geared the American public to be thirsty for blood–as long as it’s not their own. If their little angel sons and daughters have a small prick on the finger, they ready to rush them to the emergency room. But we will watch with a mixture of horror and intrigue as the offspring in Haiti wallow in mud, disease and death.

We are a tragic clump of clods, who honor Aeschylus by perusing the Internet for even MORE of the bizarre.

And if anyone such as myself would dare to object to the onslaught of the macabre, we have prepared speeches decrying these idealistic fools as “sappy”–or worse yet, “religious.”

To reach a point where we can stand tall and pursue our dreams, we will need to reject the fallacy of failure as being inevitable in the human experience. Not everything has to come up roses.

But why in the hell would we plant just thorns?