‘ONE’ PETITIONS TO ERADICATE HIV TRANSMISSION BY 2015

BY DANNY CASTRO

CONTRIBUTOR

photos courtesy of topnews.in and clicker.com

We humans tend to try to find differences between each other and end up segregating based on trivial differences.  This holiday season, I decided to see what kind of differences there are in the desires of people that are “different” from one another by asking them what they want for Christmas.  Granted, my sample is very small, but perhaps something can be illustrated.

Politics and religion have proven to be wonderful tools for discrimination.  I’m aware that there are more viewpoints than I am listing and of the increasing trend against the pigeonholing of people, but I went with the obvious and went ahead and classified.  I asked a conservative what he wanted for Christmas: Microsoft Office 2011 for Mac.  What do you want for Christmas, my liberal friend?  Well, my liberal friend told me she wanted me, which is probably not so typical of a liberal.  Good luck with that.

I searched for atheists to see what their Christmas wishes were, but alas, they are hard to find these days. I made do with an agnostic and a Christian.  I thought for a second that maybe my agnostic friend would tell me that he didn’t know what he wanted for Christmas, but instead he told me he didn’t want anything.  I thought that was what the atheist wanted.  And for you, Christian friend, what would you like for Jesus’s birthday?  She wants gift certificates to go shopping. I expected more for such an important day.  My Jewish friend told me I was silly for asking him what he wants for Christmas.

What do a Caucasian, an African American, a Latino, and a couple of Asian girls have in common?  I don’t know, but I asked them what they want for Christmas.  My white friend wants a Hello Kitty bowling ball. My black friend wants shoes. My brown friend wants a pedal board, and my Asian girlfriends want a car and a surprise, respectively.  I guess I do know what those people have in common after all: they literally have wishes.

Finally, I asked a homosexual person and a heterosexual person what they want for Christmas.  They both said they want sex.  I hope they enjoy safely.  According to USAid.gov, it is estimated that 5,500 people die every day from AIDS, one third of which are living in sub-Saharan Africa.  None of us were given the choice to be born in the circumstances we were born in—we could have just as well been born into extreme poverty.  We should put ourselves in their shoes, and most of them probably don’t even have shoes.

We humans are not so different from one another after all.  The trivial differences in the kinds of gifts we want illustrate the trivial differences we invent to segregate ourselves. We are all human.

It wasn’t my intention to make it seem as if my friends and their Christmas wishes are representative of the groups they identify with—obviously, that isn’t the case.  I’ll tell you this though, and the birthday boy said it best: “it is more blessed to give than to receive.”

This holiday season, in the spirit of giving, you should consider giving your voice to help those who need it most. 31,000 babies will get HIV in December for Christmas because their mothers have HIV. We now have the medicine and treatment to prevent HIV from spreading from mother to child. By giving your voice, you can help get this treatment to those that need it.  Please visit one.org (http://www.one.org/us/actnow/globalfund2010/) to sign the petition for No Child Born with HIV By 2015.

The ONE Campaign is made up of over two million Americans who have put their voices together as ONE to keep our leaders accountable when they make promises to help the poorest people in the planet.  ONE petitions have raised awareness, and our voices are being heard.  In 2008, 50,000 ONE members petitioned Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon to respond to the food crisis in developing countries and helped keep the crisis on the 2008 New York UN Summit agenda. As a result, world leaders pledged to commit $1.6 billion to fill in the funding gap.

Join Bono and company in making your voice heard to keep our government accountable to its promises by making this a world where children being born with HIV is a thing of the past by 2015.  As different as we make ourselves out to be, if President George W. Bush and President Barack Obama can agree on this issue, I think everyone can too.

The U.S. and all 192 United Nations member states have already agreed to achieve the Millennium Development Goals by 2015 (goals include eradicating extreme poverty, reducing child mortality rates, and fighting disease epidemics such as AIDS). Our voices serve as a reminder to our leaders that we care about those issues, that we put ourselves in the shoes of the poorest people who cannot even afford shoes, that we know any one of us could have been born into such circumstances and that we wouldn’t want that for anyone, and, finally, that we do not think getting HIV for Christmas is ever OK.