Disaster is Not a Wake Up Call

Isn't the term "wake up call" a little oxymoronic? Isn't it usually used after the fact? After all the wake up calls?

"Today the world burned up."

"Oh, a jihad."

A global pandemic is not a wake up call. "You have AIDS," is not a wake up call. Not even "You have HIV," is a wake up call.

Katrina was not a wake up call either.

Human beings are human beings because of their amazingly creative abilities (a lot of the time) to adapt to problems after the fact. And we have amazingly complex abilities to discuss them, even often long before they happen. But we didn't survive this long by being creative enough to circumvent need for adaptation in the first place. We are not preventive creatures.

I think it's way past time to quit paying so much of our expansive limited attention to the the wake up calls and just get busy in our sleep.

I don't know where this fits in the ranking, but could someone please pay some sleep action to what HIV is busy doing in New Orleans right now? You want to talk about creative opportunism, look at that tiny virus. It's not talking. It breeds quietly, unconsciously, on lack of preemptive conversation, on poor education, on broken up or lack of social support systems, on lack of and mistrust of medical intervention, on poverty, drug addiction, and desperation.

Don't let's just wait.

Federal funding for AIDS services has just been slashed for New Orleans because there are fewer people there living with "full-blown" AIDS (because there are fewer people living there total since Katrina). No regard was paid to the fact that new HIV infection rates in New Orleans are going up from every angle. And that the needs of people who have it are more extensive.

Please (all y'all) look up and contact your local International AIDS Organizations, and ask them to include New Orleans in their International work. For here, San Franciso: Pangea Global AIDS Foundation and A.S.P.I.R.E. (See links in sidebar). Maybe UNAIDS too? Don't know. I don't know anyone else at all messing with this, and I'm a little newbie blogger, so if you have any ideas for urging organizations who have power to do somth'n, please comment here for posting, and all around. Spread all your little ideas all over the place lots of different ways without having to wake up!

Or if you would rather eat and drink than talk in your sleep, you can support, without thinking about it, the NO/AIDS Task Force, tasking away, by visiting New Orleans and eating and drinking at participating Dining Out For Life bars and restaurants. (See link in sidebar.)

You can also contact CNN and tell 'um ta quit dat.

Sweet Dreams.