Commemorating fallen heroes

Last Friday I saw a young college woman with a red ribbon on her blouse. I asked her why she was wearing such a red ribbon.

“You don’t know why?” she asked in astonishment. “Why it’s World AIDS Day.”

“But why do you wear a red ribbon?” I persisted. “What purpose does it serve?”

“It is to remember those who have died of AIDS,” went her reply.

“Oh,” said I, “Have you personally ever known anyone who has died of AIDS?”

She said that she did not. So I had to ask: “Then why do you want to honor perfect strangers who have died of this particular disease? What makes this disease so special? I mean lots of people die every minute. People die of many causes. What makes dying of AIDS so special? Is it the leading cause of human deaths?”

At this point, the impressionable young liberal college student had to concede that, contrary to all the media hype, AIDS was in fact not the leading cause of human deaths worldwide. In fact, more people die from cancer, heart disease, and many other causes.

But do we have a World Cancer Day? Do we have a World Heart Disease Day? Do we have World Fatal Automobile Accident Day? If so, I must be seriously out of the loop, because I have never heard of such days. Yet we actually have a World AIDS Day!

Why? To bring on greater disease prevention awareness perhaps? To educate people on how to avoid contracting the disease? But everybody already knows how it is contracted. If you don’t engage in risky unprotected sex, if you don’t use dirty needles when shooting up dope, if you don’t get tainted blood transfusions–you are safe! And that’s all there is to know about it. People are aware.

But this–disease education and prevention–was not the reason given. The young lady said she wanted to honor the dead claimed by AIDS. She wanted to celebrate, commemorate, and honor them almost as fallen heroes–as glorious heroes who mostly died in the service of promiscuity and drug-dependent decadence.

This is what distinguishes the AIDS “victims” from the square people who have died of cancer or heart disease: They died because they had too good a time. To the demented liberal, dying from AIDS confers a special political or cultural status.

Somehow, dying from other causes is not quite as glamorous.

Never mind that some of the AIDS “victims” may have brought it on themselves through dirty living or dangerous lifestyles. The same thing can be said about those who died from heart disease or obesity. It is their fault too: they should have ate right and exercised. They had it coming.

But say whatever you might, the dead heart disease victims will never compel liberal young college women to don red ribbons in their honor on “World Heart Disease Day.” It is just never going to happen.

Strictly a personal view. Charles Reyes Jr. is a regular columnist of Saipan Tribune. Mr. Reyes may be reached at charlesraves@hotmail.com