Webcast: Creating an AIDS-Free Generation
November 8, 2011: Secretary Clinton speaks about the next steps in the global fight against HIV/AIDS at the National Institutes of Health (NIH).
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I was lucky this morning to catch this and decided immediately that it should be seen by as many people as possible... and that I should Thank Mrs Clinton as well as Invite her and Her Husband to "World AIDS Day @ the World PEACE Bell"!
Madame Secretary,
Thank you for this Inspiring and Optimistic Overview of Our Country's Commitment. As another 20 Year Survivor (I was diagnosed a month before Magic Johnson in 1991!); I've spent the last years of My Life Preaching this Gospel.
"Our stories are being hidden away in the Confidential HIV/AIDS Closet and our fellow Americans are being distracted by the more deserving and politically advantageous Global Faces & Stories of AIDS. Please understand that I empathize with their situation, but charity and compassion must come first at HOME.
Thank you for this Inspiring and Optimistic Overview of Our Country's Commitment. As another 20 Year Survivor (I was diagnosed a month before Magic Johnson in 1991!); I've spent the last years of My Life Preaching this Gospel.
"Our stories are being hidden away in the Confidential HIV/AIDS Closet and our fellow Americans are being distracted by the more deserving and politically advantageous Global Faces & Stories of AIDS. Please understand that I empathize with their situation, but charity and compassion must come first at HOME.
The Comfort of the HIVe... 03/22/2002
"...not only because of the physical limitations it imposes, but because the prejudice surrounding AIDS exacts a social death which precedes the actual physical one." Tom Hanks in Philadephia
"...not only because of the physical limitations it imposes, but because the prejudice surrounding AIDS exacts a social death which precedes the actual physical one." Tom Hanks in Philadephia
Still as true today as it was when first quoted in the movie "Philadelphia", the breadth of that social death, like the disease, has broadened into every segment of society. While the gay community, already well-versed in being regarded with disdain, rallied quickly to thumb their noses at and ward off that social shadow of death by organizing support systems and programs that would become the models that are imitated yet today, I now see a need to re-focus, energize and re-establish these social supports to be of greater value to the wider audience they now command. It often wrenchingly occurs to me that there are those among us who live in an HIV-closet because they are married/divorced, not Gay, not Male, not Adult or even not totally straight."
"If liberty means anything at all,it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear."
My other suggestion is that we refrain from using the old, outdated PWA terminology... We need to Advocate, Educate, Care, FUNdRaise, and Speak OUT for the entire HIV Community! Why? Because HIV is the only thing that separates, discriminates, stigmatizes, demonizes, vilifies, persecutes, and oppresses- US from one another while at the same time being the only thing that touches and can UNITE US- as well.
I'd like to invite you to join us here in the Tri-State-Greater Cincinnati Region for "World AIDS Day @ the World PEACE Bell".http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=148520821858073
Best Regards,
Michael
Michael
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