Courage

I am in big believer in the trans-
formative power of courage. The courage to speak truth to power, the courage to stand up and be counted, the courage to come out and be who you really are.

The last 6 years have been a true test of our community. We were/are under siege. It was not a matter of advancing an agenda, so much as it was about surviving the onslaught of a new agenda that did not include us. So we hunkered down as a way to carry on. This bunker mentality was about survival.

The challenge is to under stand when is it safe to come out of the bunker? Sometimes even though the forces have changed, we continue to live in a bunker. It becomes about safety. Yet when was anything, particularly in the AIDS movement, accomplished because we played it safe?

We are a movement that is built on courage, not safety. We did what we did to survive, but it is a new day and we need a new vision. Part of why I like Obama is because he talks about the audacity of hope. For me, hope leads to dreams, dreams lead to vision, and vision gives us to the courage to fight.

At a recent CDC meeting on AIDS in the African American community, Phil Wilson got up and challenged the audience to end all new HIV infections in the Black Community within 5 years. At first I was very skeptical, this was not possible, we did not have the necessary resources or the research to give us the road map to complete such a task. But I loved his audacity, his vision gave me hope, the hope to dream about a world without AIDS.

For this vision to happen, we need to get out of our bunkers, we need to find the courage to speak truth to power, the courage to stand up and be counted, the courage to come out and be who you really are.

So I ask you, do we have what it takes to end all new HIV infections within ALL of our communities within 5 years. If not, why not? Maybe its a lack of resources, maybe it a lack of research into proven methodologies, maybe its because we are spending all of our time doing HIV testing at the expense of primary prevention. We can develop lists of reasons why this is not possible, but on the other side is the thousands of lives domestically and the millions of lives internationally that stand in the balance waiting for our leadership.

So what audacious thing are you going to do to end the AIDS epidemic?