I REMEMBER when I first learned about the Holocaust, I wasn't told that millions of people were murdered -- I was told that millions died in camps, which seemed odd. Weren't camps the places you went in the summer with log cabins and swimming lakes? Such thinking obviously betrayed my youth and naiveté. Even without knowing they were murdered, I wondered how we let that many people die.
Today, much older and much less naïve, I am all too familiar with the disastrous human predilection towards complacency. I don't mean to drag the Holocaust into yet another exhausted parallel, but rather to observe and advocate against the complacency that is allowing thousands of children to die daily. A brief overview of the AIDS and poverty conditions in the world, particularly Africa, quickly betrays this ugly tendency of human nature: the tendency to be complacent.
The AIDS situation is nothing short of an epidemic. In Africa, however, even the term epidemic lacks the intensity to describe a disaster of "Day After Tomorrow" proportions. Sub-Saharan Africa alone harbors 70 percent of the world's HIV-positive population! The beautiful nation of Malawi, with a population of 12 million, has almost one million individuals infected with HIV; according to the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, this is about the same number of people that are infected in the entire U.S. (a nation of over 300 million people).
Every week, AIDS claims more victims than the total number of American fatalities in the Vietnam War. According to World Vision, since the discovery of AIDS, the virus has killed more than 25 million people -- or, "more than the combined population of Illinois, Indiana, and Wisconsin, and nearly 10 times the number of earthquake fatalities in the last century."
But the effects of AIDS do not stop with the obvious fatality. First, there are the orphaned children: 15 million today and 6,000 joining their ranks daily. Second, and less obvious, the effects of the deaths ripple through societies, expounding already existing problems of a different nature. For example, World Vision estimates that by 2020 AIDS will have killed at least 20 percent of southern Africa's agricultural workers.
This brings us to extreme poverty, which, combined with AIDS, claims the life of a child every three seconds. This means every time you listen to 2pac's "Changes," about 90 children have died. Extreme poverty, often defined as living on less than $1 per day, is a condition shared by over one billion people today.
These statistics do not end. I could fill up the entire length of my column simply citing statistics that should nauseate any human being. However, I figure those who were willing to read until now might be thinking, "The world harbors tragedy, yes, but what can I, as one individual, do?" As novelist Arundhati Roy once said, "Not only is another world possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing."
In other words, there is hope. Aggressive awareness and prevention campaigns in Uganda resulted in the HIV prevalence rate dropping from 21 percent in 1991 to 7 percent in 2004. Fewer than 10 percent of orphaned AIDS children receive outside assistance.
According to the ONE campaign, U.S. support allows over 400,000 people with HIV to receive anti-retroviral treatment. Yet this help is too small to reverse AIDS and poverty trends. There are two policy changes that voters, such as yourselves, can write to your congressman about. First, current U.S. expenditures on helping the poorest countries amount to a quarter or two per $100 of spent money, while the average American, when polled, expected it to be around $15. Second, according to ONE, economists estimate that "creating fairer trade policies between the richest and poorest countries of the world could lift 300 million people out of poverty by 2015." Perhaps something your congressman should hear about -- and, in today's digitalized world, you barely have to do any researching or work: simply go to www.one.org or any related charity site and click on "take action," which will then give you a host of options, ranging from those which take 30 seconds, such as signing a petition, to actually becoming a full-fledged volunteer.
The forces of human complacency are indeed incredible. While thousands, and eventually millions, die from the most preventable of diseases, we simply move on, more likely to be fazed by a couple minutes at a red light than those perishing at unfathomable rates. Our inaction is not only rationalized, but done so with the same sweeping, nonchalant attitude taken by a dieter rationalizing an extra serving of ice cream.
The first step in moving towards a better world is recognizing our own inertia, and overcoming it by taking five minutes out of our day to write a letter (often these letters are pre-written for you anyway) to your congressman, or donating $5 to an organization like the World Medical Fund, where even a couple dollars can save lives.
Sina Kian's column appears Tuesdays in The Cavalier Daily. He can be reached at skian@cavalierdaily.com.
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