Tomorrow, December 1, is World AIDS Day, and around the globe, it will be marked by events and efforts to focus attention on the ongoing impact of the HIV/AIDS crisis. Just this morning, I had a woman tell me, “it doesn’t seem like a crisis anymore.” But the truth is, across the planet, the entire human race is beinbg devastated by this ongoing epidemic, even if here in middle class white America, it doesn’t seem as visible as it once did.

Has me thinking about the earliest days of the epidemic, which I personally remember.

The other day, I came across this flyer that stands as a good reminder of where we have come from.  How far have we come and how much farther is there to go before this is no longer a global epidemic? Because of inaction in the earliest years of this disease, thousands and thousands are dead. We could not know what a difference swift attention could have meant, but we can speculate. More than that, we can vow to make sure inaction never is the cause of deaths in the future.