HOME | POLITICS | SPORTS | LIFE | SCI/TECH | OPEDS | HELPFUL TIPS
|
June 6, 2005 As a middle-class American, I have a hard time understanding how one out of every three men, women, and children in Sub-Sahara African countries could possibly get AIDS. However, it seems to be true: about 40% of the people in Swaziland, and 30% in Botswana and Zimbabwe, and 25% in gigantic South Africa have somehow gotten the HIV virus. Most of them already have developed the first signs of AIDS. If you don't believe this, look up each of those countries in http://www.wikipedia.org, or in a recent edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica. Or search the New York Times index for "Africa AIDS." Try to imagine that a neighbor living on your street has caught the HIV virus. Now imagine how one out of every three men, women, and children on your block could possibly catch it. Maybe the young males, in an "artists' colony" neighborhood, but not the women and children also --- it just isn't possible here, in what anthropologists call our American "culture." The required level of hyper-promiscuous sexual activity would have to be fantastic, at least as it would appear to lily-white, sexually inhibited and repressed (!) Americans. What evidently is happening in Africa is that impoverished males, whenever they get a little bit of money, immediately go out and pay for sex with desperately poor females (sometimes helped along with a bit of force). After catching the virus, they usually pass it on to their wives. The thing that is hardest for us to understand is the overwhelming frequency with which this is happening in Africa. It makes future progress in the economies of Black Africa seem very hard to achieve. For progress to accumulate, people have to postpone various gratifications and invest for the future. In mediaeval Northern Europe, the short growing seasons and long winters required that ancient populations resist the temptation to eat their stored food too soon. Self-restraint became an ethical principle, now deeply imbedded in our American and European heritages, and also in the written civilizations of Asia. Without a lot of self-restraint, the African cultures (that never had writing in aboriginal times) will now have a difficult time escaping poverty. The tasks of Western charities and the World Bank seem utterly hopeless, in the face of the plague of AIDS. Maybe we are witnessing a modernized reenactment of the Biblical Sodom and Gomorrah stories. Death by AIDS is cruel, and we also have to pity the grandmothers and orphans left behind --- the hundreds of millions of them. ------------ About the author: Dan Shanefield is a retired engineering prof, who worked at Bell Labs and then at Rutgers University. He wrote the book "Industrial Electronics for Engineers, Chemists, and Technicians". Visit his website or email Dan Shanefield: shanefield@ieee.org Tell a friend about this site! ------------ |
||||||
|
|
|||||||
|
