Outside
Oberlin
by Channing
Joseph
Can
AIDS Deaths be an Entertaining Distraction?
Who
doesnt love a good diversion? I mean, isnt that what
life is all about? At any rate, I think so. After all, everyone
seems to have his or her own preferred brand of escape from the
stresses, the inequities and the absurdities of the lives we lead.
And whether we choose marijuana, Jesus Christ, stamp collecting
or The Grateful Dead, you can bet your left buttock and your right
pinky toe that weve all got some kind of way out
from the grind and the humdrum of the everyday.
Yet who can be blamed? We live in a world that seems to make very
little sense, if any sense at all. Scientists have become used to
the idea that the principles of physics, as we understand them,
can change at any moment, leaving little hope for any certainty
about even less defined topics like politics, philosophy, ethics
and art. So, guess what? Athletics are that back door for many of
us, out into our personal backyards and away from our existential
confusion. We may choose to be a spectator and enjoy the simple
fun of watching a moving picture of a football on an idiot box,
for short periods of time vicariously living the lives of our sports
icons through the cathode ray tube. Or we may choose to be the actual
athletes and have our mundane worries temporarily diverted in the
exhilaration and transcendence of being in the zone.
Either way, sports can often provide us with exactly the sort of
entertaining diversion from reality that we seek.
And consequently, as such an important aspect of our lives, athletic
distractions seem to occupy a stature and importance in our society
nearly equal, for example, to the fight against deadly diseases.
This is easily exemplified by the fact that during this past year,
United States tax-payers spent a staggering $1.3 billion to help
prepare for and fund the 2002 winter Olympics in Salt Lake City,
Utah. And, of course, I will grant that the Olympics are an entertaining,
sometimes astounding and even inspirational event, however, despite
a few incidents of terrorist attacks, they are hardly intended to
be a life-and-death affair. On the other hand, the American government
is allocating a mere $2 billion to funding for global AIDS relief,
which is an amount barely greater than that which we spent on the
2002 Olympics, a single large sporting event. It is also an amount
much less than the $10 billion requested by the United Nations and
the World Health Organization.
Yet the statistics certainly prove that AIDS is indeed a life-and-death
affair in the way that the Olympic games could never be, the disease
having decimated a total of 25 million human beings since its discovery
in the 1980s. Knowing this, it is not so difficult to imagine that
there might potentially be many thousands, perhaps millions, of
lives saved by this eight billion-dollar differential between what
we as a country are willing to give and what is actually needed.
Even the extra $1.3 billion spent on the Olympic games would help
the effort tremendously. And though the many zeroes and dollar signs
may seem difficult to keep track of, these billions amount to a
mere fraction of the more than $300 billion spent last year, for
example, on military defense. And that defense money, I might add
with irony, proved to be terribly ineffective in defending the United
States during the tragic events of Sept. 2001.
But
we need our distractions, our Super Bowls, our games of war. And
many of us would balk at the thought of sacrificing these distractions
for the lives of strangers in faraway countries. Yet this attitude
is somewhat understandable in light of the history of Western sports,
as again, we can cite the gladiatorial games of ancient Rome. There
we would have found lavishly expensive events, which, like the Olympics,
would have been basically athletic and diversionary in nature, but
whose costs would have been paid not merely in coins but in the
wanton bloodshed of humans and other animals. The emperor Trajan
once held a 123-day festival, during which 11,000 non-human animals
were killed and 10,000 gladiators dueled to their deaths.
The only difference in these modern times is that the exotic, conquered
gladiators who die in immolation to our sporting events
do not die in stadiums right before our very eyes as once they did,
but they die completely out of sight, often many thousands of miles
away. Yet they die just as mercilessly, cut off from our aid and
our compassion, raising their necks to the American blade in the
way that too many people around the world seem to, in their adoration
and worship of our Coca-Cola and our MTV. They relinquish their
cultures so that they can be more like us, and we let them die because
Americans need to take care of Americans, and because despite the
notion that all races and colors and creeds can be American, some
of us are always more American than others.
So perhaps after the 40 million people presently infected with HIV
have died from lack of access to treatment, the great, unseen transformation
will be complete. Those lost will have become the martyrs who gave
their lives for our amusement and our self-aggrandizement. We might
cheer to ourselves aloud in Roman fashion, Those poor, backward
fools! They were strange and ignorant, after all. It is better that
AIDS has put them out of their misery. It is better that they have
died so that America might live, live as the best, the most superior,
the ruler of all the Earth! And when we have said this and
truly believed it, our world will finally have become one huge,
gory gladiatorial circus. And what an entertaining distraction it
will be.
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