(no subject)

I just finished watching the new PBS Frontline on AIDS. It's an incredibly long two parter, more than twice as long as normal episodes, and it's fairly devastating. Early in the documentary I chuckled to myself. They showed how in Britain they had stopped the spread of the disease among IV drug users by funding free needle exchanges. This of course was a setup to mentioning how such a thing was completely politically incorrect in America and wouldn't happen here because of our moralistic stance on drug use, that being that drug users deserve to die.. The documentary made me eat my joke though, because it went on to describe how Regan's moralistic policies wouldn’t let him do anything about the AIDS epidemic, and how he sabotaged the CDC who were working on identifying the virus and how it could be transmitted. It mentioned how around Regan’s re-election his supporters distributed paraphernalia with slogans like "AIDS: It's killing all the right people!". It didn't stop there. Almost every time the documentary brought up American involvement in control of the pandemic it seemed that our moralistic stance toward sexuality, drug use, and poor people was stopping us from doing anything about it because Christian conservatives want foreign fornicators and drug users dead anyway. There were other atrocities, for instance the first AIDS treatment available, which was developed with public money and which belonged in the public domain was subsequently patented by an American Pharmaceutical company and sold for more than $10k a year. It goes on and on and if you have four hours to spare (haha, I bet) I recommend it, although you might need tissues. Also, I had no idea, because he's usually presented in the media as "another celebrity big shot shooting off his mouth" but Bono might be the great diplomat of our age.