[Speech for World AIDS Day, 2007]
Today is the twentieth World AIDS Day; the first was held in 1988, after the UN named December first as our day to remember, witness, and celebrate the lives of people with HIV and AIDS. Of course, every year World AIDS Day has a theme; this year it’s a long-winded one – “Stop AIDS: Keep the Promise – Leadership.” This is the third year they’ve had a theme about Keep the Promise, a worldwide campaign aiming for universal access to medications, all over the world, by 2010 – just three years away.
Most people admit that the prospect of keeping that promise doesn’t look very good – not enough has been done. A couple of days ago, Gordon Brown met with AIDS activists at Downing Street; Stop AIDS Newcastle has made postcards that you can use to give Brown and your MP an extra push to do something about the promise. And today, for some reason, Bush – not someone we’re accustomed to think of as a friend – asked to double the amount of money dedicated to AIDS. So maybe our leaders will do something to bring that promise closer to reality; and perhaps some of you can join the leadership of that promise yourselves, and make it happen.
Twenty World AIDS Days, and at least twenty-six years of the crisis: other members of the Newcastle patient group are probably as amazed as I am that they’re still around after so many years. We’re astonished that we reached middle age – it’s unbelievable to me that I’m fifty-one next week, like most of us I never expected to get much past thirty – and maybe we can use those years of experience to help those who haven’t been part of the crisis for long, to help governments to keep their promises, and to have these [hold up pills] available for everyone who needs them.
•••
I’ve been thinking lately of witnessing – being a witness, a phrase that came up a lot around AIDS and HIV over the past twenty-six years. Being a witness is being present at something, seeing something – not turning away, not being unwilling to see it. That has sometimes been hard: to see people suffering, to see people dying – to see yourself suffering, and to stay with it, pay attention, see it through to the end. Witnessing someone’s death, for instance, can be very hard – but many agree that it can also be one of the greatest privileges you can experience: the connection to the person who is dying, the sense of what is real, what is important, hits you so strongly that you can never forget it. In fact, it changes you forever.
Of course witnessing isn’t always that intense – we witness people talking about their lives, about being stigmatized or supported, about the love and sometimes the hate they receive. And witnessing is often just being present – as you’re all present today. But that’s not always easy, either: this year we brought together the organizers and activities of the Eyes Open gallery showings with the World AIDS Day vigil we’ve held for the past three years, and marched the whole thing through the middle of the town – and that was a big problem for some people. The fact is, a lot of people and organizations were unwilling to march today, because it was outside, in the open, where anyone might see them. It may be hard to imagine in 2007, but there are people who are terrified of being seen to be associated with AIDS, people who are frightened that their friends and neighbors might find out, even organizations that have to be careful in case vandals smash their windows.
Of course, we can witness that too: we need to see, and remember, how hard it can be to be a witness – that it takes a lot of courage just to stand and pay attention, to watch what is happening to the people around you, even to yourself. Maybe that’s why we have silent vigils – for a minute or two, we don’t talk, we don’t run around, it looks as though we aren’t doing anything at all – well, that’s when we are witnessing, watching and remembering and standing firm in our determination not to be washed away.
When you think of witnessing, you can’t help but think of testifying: saying what you saw, what you felt, to people who weren’t there, who don’t know what happened. Of course that’s even harder – for some people it feels like putting yourself in the line of fire, sticking your head up above the trenches on a battleground of stigma and prejudice. But when we do it together, then maybe we have a chance; and maybe people hear us differently, see the crisis differently.
So: we witness who we are, witness our own suffering, the suffering of friends and neighbors, of people we barely know, or don’t know at all; and increasingly in the past decade we witness the whole world – I’m always amazed at the student Stop AIDS groups that are so much more conscious of, and concerned about, Africa than any of us were in the 1980s or 1990s; it’s kind of thrilling, really.
And when we’ve witnessed our lives and the lives of others, just maybe, when it’s down to the wire, when it really matters, we’ll be ready to testify: to say who we were, what we did, and everything, absolutely everything, that we saw.
[Newcastle, December 1, 2007]
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