My 21st New Year of Living in The HIVe: 2012!

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I Never Expected To Live This Long...

As you know; this year World AIDS Day is the Sunday following Thanksgiving on December 1st, and we are now into the third decade of this global catastrophe. The focus on this years observance is the Stigma and Discrimination of HIV/AIDS. I recently taped an interview for a World AIDS Day program being produced to air on local cable outlets. Sitting here in the living room/office space of My South Bank HIVe, I looked into the camera after being asked my thoughts and replied: "I Never expected to Live This Long". I've been thinking about that ever since. I have been a Witness since the beginning and a survivor for the last eleven years. After I was tested and diagnosed in 1991, I began writing about my experiences and compiling them under the title: "Coming OUT of Hiding: A Retrospective Journey through AIDS..." .

The purpose and goal of this endeavor: To use the rest of my life the best I can so that the people and places through which my journey leads me will remain a little bit better for me having passed their way.

Although we now know that the Virus doesn't discriminate against who it infects anymore, I think that the point that SOCIETY still does is what the theme of Stigma and Discrimination was developed to address. It is that Stigma and Discrimination that continues to present obstacles to an AIDS FREE Generation, HIV Prevention-Education-Testing & Treatment Resources as well as Outreach & Advocacy for an infected persons Human Rights and "Quality of Life" and I fear that the current medical advances and increased longevity have come to sugar coat the reality of Life, and Living, with HIV/AIDS:

From the AIDS Treatment Data Network:

"On Coming Home"
"Home is not a place; it is an attitude. It is an attitude which depends on how much we are able to feel at home with ourselves as well as with others. Home is something which happens to a person; homecoming has less to do with geography than it has to do with a sense of personal integrity or inner wholeness.
The most important of all endeavors in life is to come home. The most terrifying of fears is loneliness. It means that one has become a stranger to himself, and consequently, to others. To be lonely is to feel fear, to be forever unsettled, never at rest, in need of more reassurance than life can give.
Someone truly loves us when he brings us home; when he makes us comfortable with ourselves, when he takes from us the strangeness we feel at being who we are. We are loved when we no longer are frightened with ourselves."
"Dawn Without Darkness" - Anthony Padavano

You don't have AIDS as soon as you're infected with HIV. The disease process takes a while, around 10 years on average. The process goes from being HIV+ without any symptoms or signs of disease to being HIV+ with symptoms to having AIDS. AIDS stands for Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome. Immune deficiency means that your immune system has been damaged by HIV. A damaged immune system can't protect you from infections as well as a healthy immune system.

Human Rights Equality for PEOPLE LIVING WITH HIV & AIDS

Today, organisations of people living with HIV are a key driving force in the response to HIV/AIDS, giving a personal power to people living positively with HIV (the Human Imunodeficiency Virus) and inspiring others to action. In this section, you will find more information about PLHIV campaigns and activities.
HIVer's (PLHIV) are activists, informed patients, care givers, educators, researchers, policy makers, and health care providers. They ask questions, and do not rest before they have an answer or a solution to their challenges. PLHIV are leaders in stopping HIV and show visionary leadership in implementing and supporting prevention, treatment and care.
However, this leadership has not come easy. At the beginning of the epidemic at the Denver AIDS Conference in 1983 people living with HIV had to storm the stage to be heard. The Denver conference signalled the birth of the PLHIV movement, and first articulated the GIPA principle. People living with HIV and AIDS demanded the right to be involved in every level of decision making affecting their lives, and to determine their own agenda. These rights are as valid now as they were then.

"U.S. Supreme Court decision: "Subsequent decisions have held that AIDS is protected as a handicap under law 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.
This is the essence of discrimination - formulating opinions about others not based on their individual merits but rather on their membership in a group with assumed characteristics." from the movie "Philadelphia"

2012!? Yoda Vs Vader...
Reconnaisance of the possible roads on The Journey HOME.