December 1, 2011 Blog

RE-EXAMINING OUR PRIORITIES

Today is World AIDS Day.

All over the world people are celebrating inroads in treating a disease which two decades ago was a death sentence.

A miracle of modern medical science and political will.

Meanwhile a disease that has been around for centuries continues to leave death and destruction in its wake.

According to the World Health Organization, it will kill 2.5 million people worldwide this year.

That is more than AIDS, Tuberculosis, and War.

An entire generation of young men in Russia is dying from it.

This year in the US it will kill 125,000 people, with only heart disease and cancer causing a higher toll.

President Obama today pledged 50 million dollars to decrease the number of new US cases of AIDS this year.

But there was no pledge to fight an even bigger killer.

That killer is alcohol.

Wake up!  Alcohol is in every household, on every doorstep.  We continue to allow it to kill our young people, to emotionally scar families with the abuse it causes, and we tolerate billions of dollars in lost work and medical expenses to treat its victims.

The day is coming when the truth will be known about alcohol’s damage to our health and to the social fabric of our culture, when we spend as much for alcohol education in our middle school classrooms as we do for retrovirals in Africa.

If we continue to spread the word, it will happen.

jh