"I wish this pandemic would end", says Sarah. "Way too many deaths. Thank the Lord your mom is doing okay now."
"She's not out of the woods yet" says Carl, not looking up from his phone.
"Am I the only one here who remembers AIDS when it was one hundred percent lethal."
"Well, you are the senior member here", says Carl.
"I must have been, what, six years old when we first heard about it. Dad was reading the news aloud to me one evening, and he never was one to censor things in order to protect my innocence. Then, a couple of years later, Kenny came into our lives, and as a sex worker, he was at high risk, so even while he was on the street, Dad would keep him in condoms.At that time, at the age of eight, I knew there were homosexuals, prostitutes and drug addicts, and I knew that their unsafe practices made them particularly vulnerable to this horrible death. When Kenny was staying with us, sometimes that was all he would talk about. But AIDS, while one hundred percent fatal, was often overshadowed by other concerns, because it only seemed to affect the already marginalized. Now we have covid with perhaps a one point five mortality rate, and because it's mainstream, everyone is shrieking and whimpering....
No comments:
Post a Comment