Social Diseases

I've been reading a couple of articles (one from Reuters, the other from the Seattle Post-Intelligencer) about how the fight against HIV and AIDS is moving to the Black community in the United States. Both take pains to bring to light the fact that Blacks are very much over-represented in the ranks of the HIV-positive. I know that it sounds morbid, but I wish that the articles had also given the raw numbers, rather than just the percentages. The fact that 50 percent of new HIV cases in 2003 were diagnosed in Blacks sounds really alarming. But is that out of a grand total of 5,000 cases nationwide, 500 cases or 50,000 cases? And are those numbers going up or down?

Both articles cite the social obstacles that have to cleared in order to reduce the spread of the disease. But the Reuters article goes a little further, and summons up the ghosts of the Tuskegee Syphilis Study and quotes a man saying: "My first question was 'Wait, are you going to inject me with the HIV virus?'" But if you only know the basics about how vaccines work, this is a perfectly logical question, fears of racism or none. I seem to remember being taught that anti-viral vaccines work somrthing like this:

1) Kill or severely weaken a virus.
2) Inject the crippled virus into a person.
3) Person's immune system uses the crippled virus as target practice.
4) Person's immune system is ready for the real thing, should it ever appear.

Of course, sometimes the virus isn't as crippled is you thought it was, and someone contracts the disease for real. And when you're dealing with something that can kill you (or, make it easier for something else to kill you), that's a very real concern.

In any event, it doesn't take concerns about past injustices to be concerned about a vaccine trial that's testing a countermeasure for a disease that many people still regard as unfailingly lethal. I don't know if it's ironic or not, but it seems to me that perhaps the most enduring legacies of racism in the United States has the expectation of racism. Blacks are expected to be suspicious of Whites' intentions, almost for it's own sake, and Whites are expected to prepared for and understanding of that very suspicion. Steven Barnes (the science fiction author), in an NPR commentary, "argues that one of the reasons Sen. Barack Obama could be such an appealing candidate is that he doesn't carry the cultural baggage of slavery, since his father was an immigrant to the United States." But I would submit that the rest of us don't need to carry that baggage either. Just because our parents and grandparents taught us to lug it around doesn't mean that it's good for us. Maybe it's past time we just dumped it by the curb and went on.

It's No Sacrifice

I was listening to Steve Inskeep interview Democratic Senator Barbara Boxer from California about the environment. With the handover of control in Congress, Senator Boxer is the new chair of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works.

At one point, Mr. Inskeep asks her if she's prepared to ask or demand that people make sacrifices in the name of energy efficiency. Senator Boxer's answers are telling, in the fact that they give insight into the way that politicians deal with delicate issues -- or, perhaps more accurately, issues that some of their constituents might not like.

Senator Boxer actively avoids saying that there will be anyone who is hurt or pained by initiatives to increase fuel efficiency. She focusses on the idea that we in the United States as a whole will benefit from reducing our reliance on oil, especially foreign oil. But just because we, as a whole, will come out ahead doesn't mean that each of us as individuals will be able to make changes painlessly. Mr. Inskeep pushes her on it a little bit, but it becomes clear the Senator Boxer is not about to address what we as individuals are going to have to do to make her new environmental policies work.

Whether she really wants people to hear her saying "there's no downside for you if we do this" is debatable, but it's pretty clear that she understands that in this case all politics is, even more than local, personal. So she dodges the question of what we're going to have to do as individuals, and focusses on what we're going to gain collectively. Of course, this was really sort of a "gotcha" question on Mr. Inskeep's part, and I would have been surprised if he'd hung on to the question long enough to risk alienating the Senator.

But I think that Americans have become estranged from the idea of personal risk and sacrifice, and that modern political discourse contributes to that. Our current standard of living drinks energy resources like Kool-Aid, and if we're going to put the brakes on things like resource depletion and/or man-made global climate change, we're going to have to change our ways. And that means that there is a chance that certain among us won't be able to maintain our current standards of living. The pay off for that MIGHT be that all of us benefit down the road, but it might not -- these things are always uncertain. But risk is a part of life, and they say "Who dares, wins." This country was built on risk-taking - mainly because it turned out to be a remarkably useful material.

(If you have the chance, listen to the audio file of the interview. The posted "transcript" is abrdiged, so you miss a lot of what was said, and in any event, you can't hear HOW things are being said, when you just read it.)

Hey, it's not MY fault...

I was reading a story on MSNBC/Newsweek online about 5 cheerleaders at a high school in a suburb north of Dallas, Texas, who allegedly could do whatever they wanted and get away with it. "By many accounts, the group of cheerleaders, known as the 'Fab Five,' were out of control—an elite social clique that flagrantly flouted school rules but faced few sanctions."

Okay, nothing really out of the ordinary here - this sort of thing happens all the time, in schools all over the place. There always seemed to be one group of students that could get away with things that would result in expulsion for "lesser mortals," and they gloried in it. When I was a freshman in college, for instance, the football team was known for being more or less above the rules. Just about anybody on campus could tell you a story about something that they'd seen or heard of a football player doing that we'd been SPECIFICALLY warned would get you thrown out of school during student orientation. But this particular story gets a little better...

"But there's an added wrinkle to their tale: the Fab Five's alleged ringleader was the daughter of McKinney North's principal, Linda Theret."

Is good to have friends in high places, no?

So anyway, after the girls post pictures of their exploits on their MySpace pages. (One of these days, people are going to learn that posting pictures of yourself doing things you ought not to be doing on the World Wide Web is a bad idea. Until then, they're going to provide the rest of us with no end of water-cooler chitchat.) With the help of a cheerleading coach who'd decided that she'd had enough of being one of the girls' targets, word gets out, and the school district hires a lawyer to investigate how such goings-on could be happening in their upstanding little community. Perhaps not surprisingly, said lawyer finds that there's more than enough blame to go around, including a helping for Principal Theret.

But here's the best part, and the point of all this.

"Theret recently reached a settlement with the school board, agreeing to resign in exchange for a payment of around $75,000 and a letter of recommendation."

Wow. THIS is why people spend tens of thousands of dollars and several years going to law school. (Ex-) Principal Theret's lawyer(s) likely made a bundle by getting the school district to pay their client off, AND agree to write a letter recommending her for a job that they just ousted her from. This is where people point when they say that the American legal system is out of control. Even if the school disctrict turns out to be able to prove that Principal Theret was derelict in her duties as principal, it would like cost them at least $100,000.00 to prove it in court. By seeing to that, the principal's counsel was able to, in effect, get the school district itself to cast Principal Theret as a victim of what happened, rather than someone who should be held accountable.

Weirdness

So I get this e-mail, from a mailing list to which I belong. Here's part of it...

"Right now, there is a crime being committed which means that quite a few Immigration Employees promised to play with our files and use us as their new Sexual Plaything and then kick us out of the USA."

Once you get past the poor grammar, it becomes quite the narrative, ranking up there with the literary gems that Nigerian scammers cook up for their 419 schemes. This is allegedly the tale of a husband and wife who are fighting deportation, even though they each posess an "Authorization Employment Card and a Social Security Number." It's signed by the wife - we'll call her "Mrs. M" - so I decided to look her up on Google, and see what I could find.

And what I found looked to be mainly blog and message-board comment spam, and a couple of URLs that Mrs. M has in her name. It appears that the Ms are attempting to call attention to their plight via the web, and have been for some time. It turns out that this story has been kicking around the net for at least the past 18 months, with Mrs. M posting their sad story to a number of different websites, both in the United States and abroad. It's not always the same message - it's evolved over time. For instance, in one of the earliest postings that I found, Mrs. M claims: "My husband is a retired Colonel in the Military," and mentions a "$100 Billion Dollar Lawsuit against this Crooked Attorney." The sexual threats that they allege have been made by INS personnel aren't mentioned at that time. Another recent development in the case is "a miscarriage on the streets of Florida" from all the stress. There is also a call for a boycott against one "Ms Tanith Belbin," whom I gather is a skater. Congress and the President are accused of having "Politically interfered in the Olympics so they could send Tanith Belbin to the Olympics." It does keep up with the times - the amount of time that Mrs. M and her husband have been fighting to stay in the United States tracks with the dates that the messages have been posted, so the one I received today says they've been at for a year and a half longer than those of 18 months ago.

Mrs. M's name, while rare, is not apparently unique, so I found several hits that don't seem to have anything to do with them or their crusade, and since her full last name is that of a popular mixed drink, I found a few alchoholic recipes while snooping.

But there's nothing else about the Ms. No news stories or anything else like that. I haven't done an exhaustive search for the Ms, but most of what I did find that relates to them are posts on message and comment boards. One blogger does mention them, but only to direct people to their website - he appears to take them at face value, and holds them up as someone whom the government is screwing over even worse than they are him. But it seems that the only publicity they're receiving is self-generated, without even so much as a group of freinds promoting their cause.

I have no idea what to make of this. One person who posted about their e-mail conjectured that they were running a "[...] pay-for-protest site. You pay them money they pester people with your protest." My first theory was that someone's attempting to engage in "viral protest," putting this out there to generate buzz, and then pulling out the real issue once they have a large enough following. But after eighteen months of this, it doesn't seem to have caught on, so I'm starting to think that it's simply another conspiracy theory, courtesy of the Tinfoil Hat crowd.

Six Words

SMITH magazine had a contest earlier this month to write a six-word memior. I don't subscribe to the idea that you can tell your life story in a meaningful sense in only six words, but nevertheless six words came to me not too long ago.

"Reached for Nirvana. Couldn't maintain grip."