Sorry, if I had realized it affected me, I would have cared a lot sooner

As part of their "On Faith" section, the Washington Post posts articles and blogs from a large spectrum of humanity, from the faithful of many religions to the unbeliever. Today's guest blogger is Kay Warren, who with her husband Rick started Saddleback Church in Southern California in 1980, and she has some pretty illuminating things to say.

I have to be honest – until a few years ago, I was OK with that situation. I hardly ever gave HIV/AIDS a single thought. In the rare moments I saw a news report about it, I concluded that those who were sick probably deserved it since they had put themselves at risk. I didn’t know anyone who was HIV positive, so it wasn’t personal to me in any way. I was completely occupied with raising my family, attaining personal goals and investing in the ministry of our church. But in a single moment, all of that changed.

One afternoon I sat in my comfy living room with a cup of tea, casually browsing through a weekly news magazine. An article on AIDS in Africa, accompanied by horrific photographs, caught my attention. I was stunned to learn that (at that time) nearly 40 million people were living with an incurable disease that destroyed their immune system, causing a certain painful death, leaving 15 million children orphaned. I went to bed that night haunted by the photographs of skeletal men and women, the cries of abandoned children echoing in my dreams. I woke up the next morning still tormented by this new reality that had suddenly invaded my comfortable world.

Note the "deserved it". She didn't care about the horrible deaths of millons of people until she learned that some people who didn't "deserve it" were involved. Nice. We should note that the idea that gays deserve to die of a horrible, wasting disease is primarily a religious viewpoint.

The comments following her post call her on her indifference and hypocrisy. This first comment gets it exactly right.

It's good that you care, once you find out that lots of people, including women and children are involved. Some of us cared even while people like you were smugly enjoying your breakfast coffee, shrugging off the deaths because only people who "deserved it" (read: gay men and drug users) were affected.

Sorry, but I still don't see any real atonement for your indifference in your words. I see, "Oh, dear, I just realized that this affects People Like Me, and Innocent Children. Now I care!" Just a thought exercise - if the disease really only did affect gay men and drug users, would you continue in your indifference, on the grounds that these are not people worthy of your concern? Or would you care for the skeletal, suffering man clutching the hand of his weeping husband as he dies? Or for the woman sunk into the depths of despair, for whatever reason, who turns to drugs for comfort and finds only death?

Well said.