We need an ”uncivil“ society
This isn’t a phenomenon that happened or is happening in the developed world only - we now see brave PLWHAs and their advocates speaking up all over the world for what they deserve not as ”civil society,“ but as equal members of the human family to which we all belong.
I believe ”civil society,“ that is, the key organizations that have represented us within the UN system for so long, have become too civil, too docile-they speak the language of the UN, they work within its protocols, they are entirely too reasonable in a situation, which as the deaths and new infections pile up around the world, can only be described as madness.
Does it surprise anyone that the UN agencies and their member states treat us tokenistically? What power do we have with them when we remain silent, quiet, or when ”our“ leaders remind our own activists at the UNGASS meeting in June that you have ”two minutes to speak!“, when these activists have travelled for days to get to New York City and lower level functionaries of do-nothing governments rattle on for 10, 20, 30 minutes saying nothing?
What do the UN and its members states have to fear from the sheep that we have become? What is the threshold of human misery when we will all rise up and take the UN system, big pharma, our own governments to task for what they have allowed to happen in these past 25 years? Yes, some people live in places where speaking up can be dangerous, yet they have done it. However many people live where speaking up is easy and is done for so many other causes, but we have remained silent or within the bounds of accepted discourse, always polite, never threatening in the least.
”Civil society“ has become our own self-justifying, self-perpetuating bureaucracy, we’ve made a career out of being ”civil“ servants, the new community AIDS bureaucrats. This message from HDNET itself is so damn self-satisfied and patronizing, I could cry. It doesn’t examine its own assumptions, our own part in this mess. It just talks about more meetings, more documents coming up for us, some of us, to weigh in on, and how that work can be facilitated by our leaders.....We’ve been doing the same thing over and over again and keep expecting to succeed when will we actually take stock of what we’ve done and how we’re doing it, what PLWHAs, drug users, MSM, women, sex workers, and other at-risk communities need and want and build a movement to respond to those needs?
Well, of course, why ask questions like this? It’s much more comfortable to sit in offices day-after-day, with nothing much expected of you, with no one to be accountable to, secure in a position you’ve had for years, looking forward to a retirement, to moving onto some lucrative consultancies, and being able to go to sleep at night knowing you’ve fought the good fight.
History will judge us differently.
Gregg Gonsalves, Gay Mens Health Crisis, New York, USA
EATN - European AIDS Treatment News, Volume 14, II – Autumn 2005
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