Neither Out Far Nor In Deep
Robert Frost uses the title above to mock a shallow, short-sighted public more interested in the trivialities of meaningless distractions than real life. It’s hard to complain about him; we are much that way.
In the most significant cases, our short-sightedness takes the form of a very short attention span and an even shorter memory. Only about three months after the discovery of Buchenwald Americans were fatigued at the sight of bleak newsreels on the prison camp’s sufferers. On September 11, 2002, the first anniversary of the terror attack on U.S. soil, the president declared that we are a “patient and steadfast” nation, and that “what our enemies have begun, we will finish.” Even then it was apparent that such confidence in our resolve might be misplaced. Now there is even more reason to doubt Americans’ steadfast patience to oppose terror.
But in less traumatic but still hugely significant areas of life our short-sightedness has less to do with time and more to do with distance. The Washington Post just reported on a claim by the radically leftist group, Black AIDS Institute. That group criticizes the Bush Administration for leading the way to combat the international AIDS crisis while neglecting the general epidemic of AIDS among black Americans.
The Black AIDS Institute’s criticism is more about publicity than about a fair evaluation of government effort to address black AIDS. In fact, the organization’s tagline is, “Our People. Our Problem. Our Solution.” (By the way, “our solution” apparently means “our pressure on the government to prepare and hand us a solution.”) But the publicity is a fair goal, and has worked to some degree.
There really is still an AIDS crisis in America. But it is distributed along racial lines. While only about .3% (less than 1/3 of a percent) of Americans have AIDS, about 2% of black Americans do (anything over one percent is considered a general epidemic). While less than one-fifth of Americans are black, about one-third of Americans with AIDS are black. New statistics will probably indicate Sunday that there are about 1.5 million people with AIDS in the U.S. 500,000 of those are black. There are more blacks in America with AIDS than there are people with AIDS in some of the most infected countries of the world; than in Ethiopia, Botswana, Vietnam, Namibia, Haiti, or Rwanda. As high as Haiti’s rate of infection is, the rate of infection among blacks in Washington, D.C. is even higher–more than five percent.
It is a separate issue to point out that no it’s-their-own-fault attitude will suffice here. It is true that the epidemic is being fed by profound sexual promiscuity: 46% of new AIDS cases come from heterosexual activity in the black community, around 30% from homosexual contact. Particularly pernicious is the fairly common practice of Don-Juanism–having concurrent, multiple sexual partners. But the source of suffering in no way ameliorates its significance to those who see through Christian eyes. Compassion and help is still the only appropriate response.
So why is there so little in-our-face awareness of this epidemic. It is not for lack of effort to remind us of it. The information is available. Ads point to it through practically every medium. But most of us do not personally know anyone infected with it. So whether we are separated by six relational degrees or twenty longitudinal degrees (the approximate separation of DFW from D.C.), we simply do not look that far out from where we are.
But we should. And in the end, our unwillingness to look out far is what will challenge our belief that we looked in deep regarding our moral responsibility, not just to those with AIDS but to every other human being in need. We may not be able to solve every problem, but we could at least care. Indeed, caring may be the first step toward doing something permanent about it.
Tags: AIDS, Compassion, Parsimony
