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Hello Everyone,
You’re coming into the middle of a conversation I’m having with myself as I write this newsletter. While you’re reading, think about the goodness in life and better days for yourself and for those closest to you.
Some months ago, I listened to an audio of a group discussion, and, at the end of their conversation, a woman asked a fascinating and stunning question. It was one of those revealing “Surprise!” moments that threw me for a loop, because I understood the question and actually knew an answer!
The facilitators agreed that the next group discussion would answer the all important question in the next audio session. But, while listening through that second audio, the topic implied by the woman’s question did not show up. Evidently, the group facilitators between the two sessions had effectively declined possibilities for discussion of the topic; perhaps obvious, the facilitators wanted possibilities of polite converse, not probabilities of geopolitical and religious debates that are complex at the start.
Her question was, and my answer is: we must retrain ourselves to play by the rules of deviates if we want to confront nonconformists committed to the upsetting expansions of wars as well as economic repressions for any given citizenry, in any geographical location, at any given span of time.
The next rewrites of Western bibles and theologies, infused with possibilities of science and cosmologies, demand intellectual capacities many of us have not assumed, trained for, or exercised. Albeit, a few people reared in wealth and politics are in good faith pressing to redirect or stall or disallow ideologies, thus male dominated hierarchal slaveries, they realized since childhood were developing onerous systems characterized by standardization and uniformity. Even so, citizenries’ next generation of cultural systems might faithfully maximize religiously racist social programs; in the name of a certain God, exploit sex trafficking of both genders in their youths; intensify oppressed nations’ rampant economic indebtedness with fictitious capital: enterprises sanctified for even the smallest global networks of relentlessly profiteered, chauvinistic corporations.
Those few people of wealth, who might not rule old wealth yet have been mentally well trained and savvy, are courageous enough to presume how and when and by what means to move governments’ leaders and lobbyists around the chess board—playing by the rules of males, threatening one against the other when necessary within religious, political, and economical systems, and war games.
Dominations would also include endorsements embedded in religious tendencies many women are not about to stop serving. In many countries around our planet, physically violated females out of fear tend believing in their Messiah’s protective after-life through personal salvation rather than imagining too much the same merciless hell of this life also in their after-life. ¹
We USA residents are no where near possibilities of seeing pictures or hearing words describing physical oppressions by many countries’ ambiguous laws—our hearts don’t skip a beat while watching television and reading newspapers. Neither empathy nor sympathy can be drawn from a dearth of reporting, lacks of analyses, absence of images of galled citizenries; the void of voices is so vast that we do not realize but what placid advertising and marketing campaigns’ entertainments put in front of our noses!
Isn’t it clear by now that global public relations campaigns tell people what their considerations will be? It seems our species’ deep, psychical challenge is undoing fables implying a deity causes fortuitous miseries and blessings for some while not for others on behalf of prayerful petitions; revising euphemistic diagrams that in deed represent moralistic politicos’ and religious terrorists’ bigotries; practicing disbelieving statistical insinuations forecasting one God will win over someone else’s. Pray tell, whose ride are we on, and for whose righteous end?
Governments [and bankers] are very keen on amassing statistics. They collect them, add them, raise them to the nth power, take the cube root and prepare wonderful diagrams. But you must never forget that every one of these figures comes in the first instance from the village watchman [or swing shift computer analyst], who just puts down what he damn pleases.
~ Quote by an anonymous English judge [brackets are mine]
The rest of the ezine is a full transcription of the last few minutes of Stephen Henry Lewis’s Final Address to The Sixteenth (XVI) International AIDS Conference in Toronto, Canada, August 2006. The four section headers, as seen in the usual layout of Staying Awake ezine, are neither part of Lewis’s address nor assumed by this author as dissimilar to the spirit of Lewis’s context. ²
Men Holding Men Accountable
“The global fund to fight AIDS, tuberculosis, and malaria is still half a billion short this year, and more than a billion short next year. At the moment, there is no obvious way to close the shortfall; it is almost inconceivable that the extravagant promises of Gleneagles [in Scotland, location of July 2005 G8 Summit] are revealed as so fatuous that the global fund is now compromised. No one is asking for any more than that which was promised, but the Pavlovian betrayal of the south has already begun. Everything in the battle against AIDS is put at risk by the behavior of the G8. Yesterday, Dr. Julio Montaner courageously characterized that behavior as genocide. brackets are mine
“I remember back in 2001 in an op-ed for The Globe and Mail, I used the phrase mass murder. It’s hard in the face of the annihilating Cuban toll not to be driven to linguistic extremes. This issue of resources makes or breaks the response to the pandemic. It is imperative that the delegates here assembled never let the G8 countries off the hook.
“What has to happen, I think, is that we place a temporary moratorium on the endless, self indulgent proliferation of meetings, seminars, roundtables, discussion groups, task forces, ad nauseam, plus the production of reports, documents, monographs, statistical data, ad repetition, and concentrate every energy at country level.”
What’s Been Missing?
“At the opening of this conference, Peter Piot talked of the next twenty-five years; he’s right to do so. He indicated it would be a long and difficult haul; he’s right again. But if the next twenty-five years are to take advantage of the guarded optimism of this conference; if the next twenty-five years are to overcome the lethargy and inertia of the last twenty-five years; if the next twenty-five years are to link inseparably poverty and disease and the Millennium Development Goals, then it has to happen in country, on the ground, organized and orchestrated by the countries themselves. And, the agencies on the ground, whether multilateral, bilateral, or civil society must be held accountable. That’s what’s been missing. That’s the job of the delegates to this conference: holding people and organizations accountable.
“This XVI International AIDS conference beyond any preceding conference has given voice to youth, but it’s still a limited and marginalized voice reflecting the hostile ambiguity of the adult world. The figures are brutal and stark: fully fifty percent of new infections between the ages of fifteen and twenty-four, and yet who can deny the appalling absence of programs for and engagement of young people in the fight against the pandemic. The situation cries out for redress, and it must be redressed well beyond smarmy tokenism.”
Women’s Rights
Are Human Rights
“Finally, in my view, as delegates doubtless know, the most vexing and intolerable dimension of the pandemic is what is happening to women. It’s the one area of HIV and AIDS, which leaves me feeling most helpless and most enraged. Gender inequality is driving the pandemic, and we will never subdue the gruesome force of AIDS until the rights of women become paramount in the struggle.
“Last Monday morning at the Women’s March, the signs read Women’s Rights Are Human Rights. That was a slogan that captured the Vienna International Conference on Human Rights in 1993; it was the slogan repeated at the Cairo Conference on Population in 1994; and yet again at Beijing in 1995. It’s never been made real. And so long as men control the levers and bastions of power, it never will be real!
“Whether it’s the apparatus of the United Nations, including the agencies, or the endless number of high level panels, or auspicious studies of human development, like the Blair Commission for Africa, the demeaning diminution of women is everywhere evident. And those examples are but proxies for the wider world, particularly the developing world where freedom from sexual violence; the right to sexual autonomy; to sexual and reproductive health; social and economic independence; and even the whiff of gender equality, are barely approximated. It’s a ghastly, deadly business, this untrammeled oppression of women in so many countries on the planet.”
All Roads Lead from Women
“My closest colleagues and I have come to the conclusion that one of the ways to diminish the impact of the AIDS virus is by creating a powerful international agency for women, funded and staffed to the teeth. There must be voice and advocacy and operational capacity on the ground for fifty-two percent of the world’s population. There is a UN reform panel at the moment contemplating the creation of a new entity provided they have the courage to confront the warped and abysmal gender architecture of the United Nations. If they find the courage, I deeply believe that we could begin to still the carnage; and, what works for AIDS can work everywhere.
“I challenge you, my fellow delegates, to enter the fray against gender inequality. There is no more honorable and productive calling; there is nothing of greater import in this world—all roads lead from women to social change, and that includes subduing the pandemic. For my own part, when I leave the post of envoy at the end of the year, I have asked that my successor be an African. But, most important: an African woman!”
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