Remember what it means to say that we're all human

Pissed Off Patricia has a moving blog post about her friends who have passed from AIDS in honor of World AIDS Day today. I will never forget--a good friend of mine lost one of her best friends a couple years ago from the disease. She heard he died and the next day got a card from him in the mail that he had sent right before he passed. It was a photograph of him sitting up in bed, his body wasted to absolutely nothing. He was a skeleton--no hair, no flesh. She kept comparing it to a photo she had of the two of them in happier times, laughing, healthy, young.

She couldn't say why he had sent the picture. "I guess he wanted me to know what he had been through," she said, not crying as is her habit. She's too tough, I suppose.

All the finger-pointing and rhetoric makes us forget that this disease wipes away real people, with lives, family, friends, and memories. It makes us dehumanize the victims in ways that are startlingly cruel. More than anything, I just want people to take a moment and remember that the people who pass from this disease are entirely too human. It could be you or me.