America Living With AIDS

AMERICA Living With AIDS

We must learn to practice the justice,
freedoms, and compassions that we take so much pride in talking
about in civics classes and teaching our children about when we tell them
what it is to be an American.
Our response to AIDS must
take into account how all people with AIDS and HIV live and recognize
that we aren't all in San Francisco or New York using systems that
are collapsing from the weight of us. Some of us are in
Kentucky and Alabama and Missouri and Iowa, still trying to find a doctor
willing to treat us or a home care agency that will send the nurse without
requiring a baseline antibody test for her...
I have to say that people living
with AIDS and HIV want nothing more or nothing less than what all
of you take for granted today-a place to live, the right to have a
job, decent medical care, and to live our lives out without unreasonable
barriers. We are not asking for extras, only to be included in what
America already delivers to her privileged people.
I'm thirty-one this year and my
life has been blessed with two healthy children-a six-year-old daughter,
and a son who is almost three. Relatively speaking, I'm not in bad shape
and I used to hope that I would be able to live long enough to see my
children, with the help of their father, accept and adapt to the inevitability
of my death. More lately I've been hoping that when I'm gone they
wouldn't continue to be stigmatized by the shadow thrown by my public
life.
But compassion is not going to
happen because of a report that we make or an edict that somebody in
Washington delivers. It will begin in the small towns in the quiet country
throughout America when people understand that people living with AIDS
and HIV are just like us because they are us.
BELINDA MASON
September 1989