Originally posted on theFreshXpress.com
I’ll be honest. Just hearing people discuss HIV/AIDS scares me.
There are more than 1.1 million people living with HIV/AIDS. Eazy-E, one of the original hard core gangsta rappers fell victim to it. Magic Johnson, one of the greatest hoopers to ever grace the earth (and a LAKER at that) is living with it. It hits even the toughest and the most graceful. Its real… and yet it isn’t. I don’t actually know anyone living with HIV/AIDS. I don’t know anyone that has died from it.
And that’s what scares me.
21% of people living with HIV don’t know it. How they came up with that number, if those people haven’t been tested, baffles me. Yet I’ll trust the statistics, and I’ll try to avoid becoming one. I know its a real disease. No cure. Its not like the Sexually Transmitted Infections that people aren’t afraid to discuss (at least people I know), because you can’t just go take some antibiotics and be done with it. Its something that will literally take you out the game. The fact that I don’t know anybody living with it scares me, because of the high number of people that DON’T KNOW. I figure…somebody HAS to have it. Its like when you’re sitting in your first college course, and the professor tells you to look to your left and your right, and one of those people won’t be there when you graduate. I knew it may not be those people in particular, but I got the point. And it proved to be true. The numbers don’t lie. People have HIV/AIDS. And people also don’t know they have HIV/AIDS.
And that’s what scares me.
It is hitting our community hard too. As a black man, I KNOW we don’t discuss it in our inner circles. We’ll discuss the curable things. We’ll joke about not getting “burned”. HIV/AIDS is taboo though. We don’t even mention it by name. Too scary of a thought…being mortal (you know us young brothas are tough). We’ll talk about sex in a minute though. Actually…alot. No details necessarily…just the pursuit. In our society, Sex Rules. Sex Sells. Sex is on My Mind (classic, but I digress). Sex is prevalent in everything that we do. Even in casual conversation, there is often a sexual undertone. Chris Rock said it best: every time a man is being nice to you, he’s offering you d***. Hate to be blunt, but hey, often single (and committed) men have sex on their minds when dealing with the opposite sex (and same, in some cases). Sex happens, its a fact. And its often casual. There often isn’t any talk of STI history or HIV tests occuring prior to that sex either. In fact, often its after a night at the club. So with all the casual sex going on, and the lack of knowledge about who actually has HIV/AIDS, I’m sure its getting spread. Do I actually know? No, I don’t. But unfortunately when I’m with my boys…other young, successful, ambitious, culturally conscious, people who are going to make a difference in our world…and I look to my left, and to my right…one of us may not be here.
And that scares me more than anything.
