by David Waggoner
When we go into the voting booths every four years to elect a new (or incumbent) President, we often look for someone who “connects” with us. Sometimes people even shift a candidate’s controversies to the background if we think he or she truly empathizes with our needs, struggles, and desires. Connectedness is important because it gives us, at the very least, a temporary reprieve from our fragmented world. At the very most, connectedness is creative—building community where once there was none, nurturing families that had only once existed in our imaginations.
That’s what I find amazing about publishing this magazine—it connects me to so many people, some new friends and some renewed. When I receive mail from long-lost friends I am delighted to hear from them (even if I’m ticked off it took this long). Often it’s because they have picked up a copy of this magazine; or they were visiting a Web site that mentioned A&U as a resource. Sparked by that wish for connectedness, they figured now was as good a time as any to renew our friendship.
That was what happened a couple of weeks ago: An old friend who I didn’t know was gay suddenly called me to tell me he was HIV-positive. Twenty years ago he didn’t know he was gay. Since then, he’s been afraid of coming out of the closet. AIDS was his was way of doing it, he confessed.
My friend didn’t know about the magazine until he picked it up in the waiting room of his doctor’s office. When he discovered A&U, he was delighted to find that the editor of this publication was the very same person who he used to hang out with on weekends at our university’s late-night poetry readings at the Underground, a popular alternative literary haunt. Although we might not have the same energy to go at it all night at open mics, we care enough about how each is doing to reach out across the years and miles. I was thankful that our connection had come full circle—even though now writing about AIDS had replaced writing about our youthful angst as our common ground—and that I was able to form a new alliance out of an old one.
That same connectedness is what this month’s cover story, Doug Wilson of the hit TV show Trading Spaces, talks about when he says, “Doing what you can...approaching life from a practical, cyclical standpoint is important and goes beyond tangible things....It’s not even enough to say you have to be part of the solution. Sometimes you have to create the solution.” And he reminds us to pay attention to how connections come full circle: The skills he developed in the world of theater now bode him well as an interior designer; the efforts to eradicate pediatric cancer will connect to fighting pediatric AIDS.
Raising awareness about HIV/AIDS is perhaps one of the greatest and most difficult accomplishments in these sour times. With everyone rattled by the economy and the woes of war, focusing on other peoples’ problems—such as cancer or AIDS—is actually a healthy alternative to overeating, committing road rage, or consuming too much alcohol. Getting out and putting yourself in the shoes of others is an ideal way to step out of your own problems for a time and help solve those of others.
Treating friends, family, or even strangers with extra kindness this Thanksgiving makes the epidemic not so grim, and certainly not so hopeless. I may not be able to pay for the cure, but at least I can share the hope that someday there will be a Thanksgiving Day the whole world can celebrate. A day without AIDS.
November 2004
