When the world ends, all that remains is the room I never get around to clean.
Recently I started watching the telly again. It's strange, just when I thought local TV has nothing meaningful to offer other than mimicking HongKong and Korea's fanfare waste of large family drama with blood conflicts, deceits and finally poetic justice, redemption to round them up in a 'Ah man, why are we killing each other like this? Ah man, ain't blood thicker than water? Ah aw aw ha ha ha...' Bah. Then came along a small budget educational series called 'By My Side' or 不凡的爱. Think blood is thicker than water again? What about tainted blood?
Though educational and filled with repetitions of debunking Aids' myths, the story is nevertheless well woven. Instead of condemning the diseases and the victims with 'This is what you deserve for fucking around', it plunges well intended and kind characters into spiral torments of the disease's demises, showing that anyone could be susceptible. And he comes haggard, diseased and feared. Kind of makes one wonder if it's better not to know at all.
I have never seen a breakdown of a character and the complete destruction of a life in just a mere second. Usually one have to work into facilitating main characters into his downfall. Probably an episode or two. This only takes a second to the doctor's office.
The disease process of Aids is not that scary, say compared to cancers. It takes five to ten years to kill the immunity system and what with better medications these days to slow it's progress, one could still function in society.
However it is often the society that kills Aids' patients than the illness itself. No matter how advanced we think our civilization has become or how enlightened or progressive we are, the sole topic of Aids immediately turn us back into the Dark Ages. Witch hunting, outcasts, group discrimination, warmongering and fear take precedent to sensibility. We now know that how Aids could have spread, yet we continue to fear. Fear is alright, it pushes us to find solutions to cope and to survive. But irrational fear based on ignorance, selfishness and of most insecurity will kill us all one day. Cue The Crucible, the rise of Hitler,
la Grande Peur and McCarthyism.
The affected family was immediately marked when the news leaked. Extreme communalism wiped out whatever logistic resources, friendship, welfare and employment opportunity they owned. The parents warned their children to flee away from their disease-free girl. The disease-free wife has to take up to three jobs to support the family and has to travel out of the vicinity to buy grocery. Short of stoning them, the social stigma weights crushingly onto them.
One mistake and that's it.
It is the ugliest disease because it punishes people for enjoying relations. It punishes people for unfaithfulness. It punishes people for practicing pre-marital sex. It punishes people for drug use. It is no more a medical illness, it's a moral indignation. It is pure judgment.
Aids kills is an understatement. It ruin, destroy, butcher, devastate and torture it's victims. Aids is a simple illness. It does two things. It deplete Helper T cells collapsing the immunity system and it is contagious. How could such simplicity be allowed to be blow up to magnitude?
I want to say it's the work of God. But I find it hard to explain why He would hurt his own children so. Maybe we had never been perceived so in the very first place.
