That's actually a portrait of the composer, Verdi, painted by Boldoni. I've matched it with the work of a still-living painter, Paula Rego. The result is as much about the color blue as it is about anything else.
Today I go in for my annual ADAP recertification, so I can keep getting the Aids Drug Assistance Program to help pay for the meds that keep me alive. I completely get that they need to recertify my income and residence on an annual basis, the part that I find funny is a recertification of my diagnosis. To my knowledge, no one who has tested positive for 20 years has ever suddenly tested negative.
My blogami Rod shares about the increase in HIV transmissions, particularly in the black community rife (still) with men who have sex with men but still somehow think you need to call yourself gay to be at risk for HIV. He laments how little outrage he can manage to conjure up over this statistical trend, resulting in more of a sigh of resignation than a willingness to go out and pour blood on the steps of the capitol. ( I think Rod feels he should be as angry as so many of us were in the Act Up 80s, but then again, Rod LOVES the 80s)
I understand the sentiment, but I'm not sure I agree. It's 2008. How many more prevention messages, billboards, outreach programs, advertisements, etc. can we come up with? How efffective were they ever or will they ever be? After all, we've had 40 years of the pill, condoms, IUD's, sex education, and abortion, and still young women have babies out of wedlock in the millions. Since 1964, we've had warnings on cigarettes, banned their advertising on TV, watched 300,000 people a year die of lung cancer, and still, millions smoke. We've had a certifiable idiot as President and Satan himself as V.P for eight years, breaking every law of the land ten times over, and still we have not impeached them--even though the last one was skewered for a mere blowjob. We're spending 10 billion dollars a month to occupy a country that doesn't want us there, and at least that much to incarcerate three times the percentage of the adult population as any other industrial nation, all while 34% of our population uses the local emergency room for their primary healthcare.
If I start taking the profound irrationality of how our society approaches problem-solving personally, I will end up spontaneously combusting. You can accept things as they are and do what you can about them without needing to be in a state of fury or lamentation or liberal guilt over it all. (And trust me, on a daily basis I have to fight the sense that I am personally at fault for every bad thing that happens on the planet, because I don't do enough.)
My head tells me anger is a form of action, and humility is surrender. It's quite the opposite. Recognizing I am 1 in 6 billion, accepting-without rage-- the reality of ignorance, poverty, injustice, and a whole lot of irrational behavior in the world makes me far more likely to be effective in making whatever impact that I can make on it all. It will never be enough to satisfy my boundless ego, which wants me to be nothing less than the love child of Obama and Oprah, midwifed by Bill Gates and as talented as Tracy Ullman, but it may just be enough to satisfy my soul.
MCO 2008
I like that phrase, "outrage fatigue." I think that I may have a touch of that myself. I've missed my daily dose of you. I've re-read the sentence about the certifiable idiot three times and it cracks me up every time. Of course, if I think about the idiot and satan too much, it also makes me want to scream. You do have a way way with words.