The value of life in the Age of Denial

December 6, 2007 by Pastor Dan.

The AIDS quilts are coming down today, after being displayed for over a week. Hundreds of people came and viewed them, read their messages, and thought about their significance. On these particular panels, some 24 people who died of AIDS are commemorated.

Our friend Paulette procured them from the Names Project Foundation in Atlanta to display over the period of World AIDS Day and our World AIDS Hollywood Vespers Concert.

The last visitors, last night, were teenagers from the Silverlake Children’s Theatre Group, who were on site for their regular rehearsals. They were very interested, and respectful of what they saw. None of them had been born when most of the individuals whose names appear on the quilts were dying of AIDS.

Alas, AIDS has become a “generational thing” in America. Too many young people have little to no experience of anyone having HIV or AIDS. It is natural for them to think it’s an old people’s disease, or a former disease, or one that will never affect them. Tragically, too many young gay people are having unprotected sex in the mistaken belief that AIDS is not their problem. Their gullibility to this falsehood is increased under the influence of crystal meth, which lowers inhibitions to sexual expression. Looking for “hookups” online is deceptively easy. And people still lie about their status. Yesterday a 365Gay.Com story reports allegations that a Roman Catholic priest and Navy chaplain has been having unprotected sex with other men without disclosing that he is HIV+.

AIDS is still killing people by the thousands, although we do not see it as much in America. America can (just barely) afford the miracle drugs that have kept tens of thousands of people alive during the last 15 years. We know individuals who have been living with AIDS for more than twenty years, so AIDS is no longer an automatic death sentence.

I remember our friend Andy, who came to Lutherans Concerned events in the 1980s. Young, cute, blond, buff, pleasant, Andy was a UCLA student. He was, however, not out to his parents. And he was not aware of how easily he could contract HIV. In those days there were no miracle drugs. Andy got sick, very sick, and was diagnosed with the virus. In a matter of days, his parents learned the awful truth: that he was gay, that he was infected, and that he was dying. Andy was dead before most of his friends even knew he had been sick.

But because his death occurred twenty years ago, today’s youth just have no connection with it nor with the hundreds of thousands of people who died in their youth.

After years and years of activism, from “Play Safely” ads in gay magazines to total abstinence programs which Republigelicals have been pushing so hard, too many people have little understanding of AIDS or why it must be stopped globally. “Stop AIDS: Keep the Promise.”

One would think that visualizing AIDS as an enemy to be defeated would inspire a new generation of activists. But I’m not seeing that yet. And I don’t think it’s because people are that complacent about the disease, but they seem to be complacent about life itself.

Americans are the worst of human beings when it comes to denial. We are certainly the epicenter of death-denial and death defiance.. Evel Knievel just died November 30, incidentally, after a 40 year career of doing imaginative, stupid things to get attention. A man in Omaha Wednesday killed eight other people in an Omaha shopping mall before killing himself. He apparently left several suicide notes, including one that said, “Now I will be famous.”

And we are in a state of pathological denial about the causes of death, and will eat, drink, race, have sex, and blow off every form of danger, commit murder and suicide, as if our lives do not matter.

Perhaps our lives do not. There is the thinnest of lines between carelessness and callousness about life. But life is what you make of it. Reverence for life is not inherited, it must be learned, adopted, believed. To honor those whom we have lost —such as we did Sunday with the lighting of candles and reading of the names of 250 people— is to love life itself as a gift of God, and to respect ourselves and our finite existence even more. What is “the meaning of life”? The meaning you give to it, beginning with self-respect.

Remember the dead. Thank God for life. Stop AIDS. Keep the promise.

—Pastor Dan Hooper, Los Angeles

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