Watching the movies for assignment four has been an eye opening experience. I watched Common Threads, Silverlake Life, and The Age of AIDS. Out of all of them I liked Silverlake Life the most even though I cried the hardest. Nothing usually freaks me out or grosses me out. I wanted to be a surgeon ever since I was little so I would watch surgery constantly on discovery health. But when Tom died in the movie I couldn’t deal with it. I think it was the fact that I knew I was looking at an actual dead body and then to see how emaciated he was it was terrible. I had to stay up and watch TV for awhile so I could calm down enough to go to bed.
Oh one more thing, I am so excited for Spring Break!!
Blog Add On: People with AIDS
Anthony Perkins: He was a bisexual actor who played Norman Bates in Hitchcock’s Psycho (Laurie, 2007). He found out that he had AIDS in 1990 from an article he read about in the National Enquirer (Laurie, 2007). The magazine had illegally tested his blood sample that was used for a palsy test and tested it for HIV (Laurie, 2007). He thought he had AIDS for 6 years previous and has said “"I have learned more about love, selflessness and human understanding from the people I have met in this great adventure in the world of AIDS than I ever did in the cutthroat, competitive world in which I spent my life" (Laurie, 2007). Anthony died in 1992 from pneumonia that was brought on by his AIDS (Laurie, 2007).
Pedro Zamora: He was on the MTV show the Real World San Francisco (Laurie, 2007). He was an openly gay Cuban man who found out his status during his junior year of high school (Laurie, 2007). He had donated blood to the Red Cross and it was flagged “reactive” (Laurie, 2007). After finding out he was positive he became a very active public speaker about AIDS (Laurie, 2007). He died in 1994 (Laurie, 2007).
Discrimination from HIV/AIDS not only happens to adults, it happens to children as well. Some children are teased and harassed so badly that they have to change schools. This is what happened to a boy named Michael in
"At first relations with the local school were wonderful and Michael thrived there. Only the head teacher and Michael's personal class assistant knew of his illness… Then someone broke the confidentiality and told a parent that Michael had AIDS. That parent, of course, told all the others. This caused such panic and hostility that we were forced to move out of the area. Michael was no longer welcome at the school. Other children were not allowed to play with him - instead they jeered and taunted him cruelly. One day a local mother started screaming at us to keep him away from her children and shouting that he should have been put down at birth…. Ignorance about HIV means that people are frightened. And frightened people do not behave rationally. We could well be driven out of our home yet again” (Avert, 2010).
Also children who have been orphaned by AIDS can encounter “hostility from their extended families and/or community, may be rejected and/or denied access to schooling and health care, and left to fend for themselves” (Avert, 2010).
The picture above is a poster in
I have that poster in a puzzle a student made for me one year. You would think that almost 30 years into a disease that we can now begin to behave when we hear that someone is positive. Instead we act like we don't know anything. Lord help this world when the next thing surfaces and causes more damage than HIV.
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