AIDS has taken the lives of 25 million people since it was first identified in 1985. In 2005 alone it took the lives of an estimated 3 million people, almost 600,000 of them children. The World Health Organization estimates that in 2005 between 3.4 and 6.2 million more people were infected, and that more than 64% of all people living with AIDS are located in Sub-Saharan Africa (76% of all women with the disease are found in the same region). In 2005 there were an estimated 12 million orphans with AIDS living in Sub-Saharan Africa alone.
There is no denying that AIDS is a global epidemic and that its eradication should be the focus of a serious and highly urgent global effort. So isn’t it heartbreaking to think that globally over a trillion dollars a year is spent on armaments to kill perfectly healthy people?
Perhaps the earth is simply tired of us. Of all the animals in creation, we serve the least purpose, and our lack of humanity tends to demonstrate that on a daily basis when it comes to the fight against AIDS, especially in those parts of the world where help is needed most. If there was ever a greater need for a world super power to unilaterally and preemptively invade a region of the world, surely this cause is of far greater import than most. The ground troops of such a force could be populated by medical personnel, the stated goal of the mission to help the dispossessed who have thus far suffered under the ignorance of those who refuse to deal with the realities of this epidemic. That is an invasion that I would support, illegal or not.
Perhaps the earth is simply tired of us. Perhaps that is why the Ross Ice Shelf, which is the size of France, could, at any time, simply break off of the Antarctic continent causing global water levels to rise dramatically. Not that that should deter us from making any radical changes in our lives. Not that it should stop us from spending a trillion dollars a year on fascinating new ways of killing one another.
I have always found the acronym ironic – AIDS.
