Frontdesk by David Waggoner
A crystal ball isn’t necessary to know where AIDS is going in the New Year. As AIDS activists are imprisoned in China, while the World Trade Organization clamps down on “rogue” nations for attempting to reduce the cost of producing their own AIDS medicines, and international leaders stall or even stand in the way of “forgiving” debt that could help reduce human misery, the world looks a lot like it did at the beginning of the pandemic—out of focus. And it doesn’t seem that things will be clearing up anytime soon in the world of AIDS. The weather is frightful, and so is the ignorance all around us.
It would only seem appropriate to call Iraq a failed, unfocused war, where its first free elections may have to be stalled once again because political parties are too afraid to run candidates and police officers are losing more of their lives than the terrorists are losing theirs. What have we done to our ability to see the truth, and why haven’t we done something before it is too late?
Even the United Nations seems to be an organization without a focus, and possibly without a future. What about the growing oil-for-food scandal that is plaguing this most elite of all human-rights organizations? It seems that the ethics of the twenty-first century statesman are being called into question, and well that they should be. When career diplomats are no longer held accountable, when religious leaders would rather have us wear death sentences than condoms, then life on earth does look a little murky. I wonder how we look from outer space? Who knows when we’ll take the next step in exploring other worlds, but it doesn’t mean much when we can’t even conquer our own desire to harm our earthbound neighbors. Clarity starts at home.
While overwhelming, the fear of an uncertain future is often of no consequence to those who can imagine a world without war, without poverty, even without AIDS. Negativity has no place for such clear-headed visionaries; it doesn’t leave a lasting impression on them. In this issue we honor one of last year’s fallen heroes (and eternal optimists) in the fight against AIDS: poet and A&U’s Literary Editor, Christopher Hewitt. In a moving tribute to Chris’s insistence that activism starts with the power of the word, on the last page of the magazine the poet Raymond Luczak reminds us that it only takes one person to make a world of difference.
As one of the AIDS movement’s most esteemed poets, Chris found out how easily we are tempted to hate one another; how much more difficult it is to love. In his eyes, people living with AIDS or, as in Chris’s case, brittle bone disease (Osteogenesis Imperfecta), were heroic by their very act of living. For Chris, being a poet, essayist, critic, and defender of “the diseased” was an all-consuming passion. To portray the endurance of the human spirit meant everything to him. Meanness was not in Chris’s vocabulary.
Although Christopher Hewitt passed away in 2004, his legacy lives on in the many lives he has touched and strengthened. He is why magazines like A&U thrive; why readers and writers alike respond to these “living pages.” For life is too short without art, poetry, fiction, music, and humor. That’s what always impressed Chris about A&U: that pain does produce remarkable moments of beauty. But Chris was never one to prefer art to life; he was always full of new ideas about how the civilized world could and should behave.
This spirit of taking others to task for their indifference to AIDS is why this issue is dedicated to Chris. A man of ideas, Christopher Hewitt was a poet whose words inspired us to take action.
January 2005
