The dragon and how to kill it

Dec 6th, 2011 2:42 PM UTC
By ONE Partners

Dan Haseltine, lead singer of Jars of Clay and founder of Blood: Water Mission, reflects on his experience at ONE and (RED)’s World AIDS Day event, and compares the HIV/AIDS epidemic to a dragon.

I’m sitting in a mostly quiet airport eating an international dinner (read: China Panda), trying to remember names and faces and which comments went with the particular faces and names I could remember with a little help from the pocket full of new business cards I acquired. My first thought is, “The Ronald Reagan Airport has great lighting.” My second thought, which has equally little to do with my day is, “I wish the Dunkin Donuts was still open.” But my third thought, the one that has been rattling around in my head since 6:30 a.m., was, “How do you kill a dragon?”

You see, as I write this, I am winding down from a day spent wandering the halls of the Senate, as part of a World AIDS Day initiative. I started my morning with a walk to George Washington University interrupted by a detour into the strategically located Starbucks across from the Jack Morton building where we were going to gather.

The man who stepped in line behind me was obviously a regular, and well-known. I was able to surmise that he was the manager of the building where ONE and (RED)’s World AIDS Day event was being held. I ordered my drink, and stepped toward the bar.

“Do you think you might meet him?” Someone was speaking to the “regular” who managed the building.

In a space about to be inhabited by President Obama, President Kikwete of Tanzania, Muhtar Kent, CEO of Coca-Cola Company, President Clinton and President Bush, it was obvious who they were speaking of… Bono.

It is a strange social economy we find ourselves in these days. I smiled, grabbed my drink, and stepped back out into the cool morning air.

I arrived just as the Secret Service and police forces were making their final security sweep of the building. It is habitual for me to show up early for events such as this. Not just a little early, more like hours before. I do it when I speak, and apparently, I do it when I am just attending.

The event was titled, “The Beginning of the End of AIDS.” It was taken from an impassioned speech given by Senator Hillary Clinton a few weeks earlier, where she brought to light the new and hopeful scientific research surrounding HIV/AIDS treatment and awareness.

The big shocker was that it turns out that treatment IS prevention. The antiretroviral drug regimen actually reduces the virus to a form that is almost non-transmittable, reducing the likelihood of sexual transmission by 96 percent!

This is AMAZING news. It means that the very same drugs that keep people with AIDS alive, is also stopping the transmission of the disease. And what this means is that we may simply be generations away from the end of AIDS.

Last summer, I read J.R.R. Tolkien’s, “The Hobbit,” to my son. It began with a few chapters and then a short encouragement from me often ending in the phrase, “It gets really good later.” It was hard to keep his attention for a bit of the set up, the development of the story and characters. It was hard to remember who all the primary characters were, and not get them mixed up. I found myself backtracking quite a bit so that we could remember which elves were which, what weapons they carried, and why they were significant to the story. “Let’s keep reading… the part with the dragon is coming up,” I would say.

The descriptions of carnage finally came as we read pages describing entire mountains reduced to embers, and whole villages full of people simply gone and the invasion of fear and loss of joy and wealth. It reminded me of something else.

I am not a child of wizardry. I wasn’t raised on fantasy stories. I have never owned a set of recklessly multi-sided dice. But I have read a few novels that seem consistent in their portrayal of dragons. They are superior in intelligence and cunning, and often described as “flying death.” They are able to adapt to the skills and methods of their victims. They are relentless, and indiscriminate in their thirst for wealth and blood. They are difficult to kill. And once they have laid claim to a land and its people, the outlook is most definitely grim.

AIDS has been around for 30 years. In 30 years, it has been responsible for 30 million funerals. When the disease was first discovered, it didn’t even have a name. No one was quite sure what to do with a virus that attacked the immune system and was capable of morphing to adapt to treatments.

It was reported as GRID, and also as, “the gay cancer.” Finally it became, “AIDS”. Whatever it was called, it meant certain death. And that was just the beginning. It wasn’t just a disease that affected the body. It was a carrier of fear.

Human beings are strange and complex things. Without understanding, we tend to react out of fear. We have a bent to want to destroy what we do not understand, even if the act of destruction is more time consuming and costly than the time invested in studying or knowing. We don’t like what we can’t explain. If we don’t know what causes a disease, how can we trust the people around us to keep such a thing from spreading?

Fear became stigma and in its path are millions of lives that have been scorched and reduced to embers simply because they were thought to be HIV-positive. People were driven from their families, their workplaces and their homes and communities. They were not allowed to touch their children, or come to their churches. They were left for dead, far before the disease had even begun to stake claim.

Dragons like gold. This was something else I learned from, “The Hobbit.” They can smell gold, and they have a well-developed instinct to horde it. They have no use for it in the economic sense. They simply want to take it from the homes and coffers of their victims. They don’t want just a portion, but every last galleon or coin. Dragon’s sleep on the gold, they brush their hardened scales against it, and let it drip from between their callous talons. It represents a bleeding of sorts of the villages where a dragon’s focus rests. It is a tangible stripping away of power and place. Without a form of wealth, the basic things needed for survival become harder to come by. Villages collapse for lack of productivity that devolves into lack of shelter, food, education and hope. Darkness sets in, and with it, the poison that brings men and women to give up entirely.

Billions of dollars have been spent on HIV/AIDS. It is just the necessary path leading from nothing to understanding. It costs money to fail and then to fail again, until eventually the desired outcome presents itself. I have been in many conversations with skeptics who are quick to remind me that many people have made a lot of money in the, “AIDS business.” And that this is money we will never see again.

“How do we kill it? How do we get close enough to spy a weakness, or a soft spot where we can let our swords or arrows burrow deeply beneath its scales? Does it have a weakness?” These are the questions that the bravest of knights were plagued to answer.

I imagine that the act of killing a dragon could never truly be a solitary act. Perhaps if dragons were soft, meek things, the first person to come upon such a beast might also be the one responsible for immediately destroying it. But as we understand, dragons are not such things.

With breath strained from the act of running for dear life, and choked by overwhelming fear, we hear countless descriptions of the evil lurking before us. Each encounter takes on greater risk, and a clearer picture of what this “thing” is.

Until one day, a weakness is discovered. In “The Hobbit,” the weakness was a soft spot on the underbelly of Smog.

The US through the incredible formation of PEPFAR (President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief), and the building of the Global Fund, is responsible for providing antiretroviral drugs to more than 4 million people. Those treatments have allowed us to get very close to HIV/AIDS. We have found a weakness.

I can picture the mixed emotions of a village tormented by a dragon when they find out that such a creature has a weakness. It would be a collision of new hope with old defeatism. It would be a conscious effort to clear the mind and focus on the task at hand. People have been laid to waste. They are tired and weary. But at this moment when they are most vulnerable and their enemy is most vulnerable it becomes a choice of who has the soul strength to dig in and make a final stand.

The fight against AIDS is not sexy anymore. It isn’t the hip cause of the month, or media saturating conversation on our television sets. The people and organizations who’ve joined the fight seeking some kind of pittance of glory have fallen away leaving only those of us who share some inherent purpose woven deeply in our souls for wanting this disease to meet its end. We are weary. We have been ravaged by cynicism and disappointment. And we are hearing the words, “The Beginning of the End of AIDS.” We are letting the words roll over in our heads, “We found a weakness.”

We now know that the ARV treatments reduce the potential transmission of the virus by 96 percent. If you add the health benefits of male circumcision and the wonder drugs that prevent mother to child transmission of the disease, we have a found a path to end the evil oppression of this disease.

I have watched enough movies and read enough books to spot a scenario from miles away. It is the commonly used device of nearly killing an enemy. You know the scene. The beast is lying in defeat nearly breathing its last breath, and rather than complete the final act giving the beast over to death, our hero pauses.

We are pausing. We know the path. We have the resources. We have the means to end AIDS. And instead of burying our blade deep into its black heart, we pause.

It was reported that many of the countries that pledged financially to the Global Fund for AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, have not made good on those pledges. It has also been reported that PEPFAR is on the verge of losing funding. The weariness of the fight has set in.

I will write one last thing about dragons. They heal quickly and return to the place of their wounding with great vengeance, fueled by a grudge that only makes them stronger. If someone sets out to kill a dragon, then they must kill a dragon.

We have set out to end AIDS. We must. The most valuable and effective swords that are available to us, are the voices we raise. My flight is about to take off. And the echoes of conversations from earlier today carry a common point. The government will tune its ears to the strongest voice. It will act upon the expressed concerns and cares of its people. We must let government know that we are here to kill a dragon.

We will not stand by as we lose our foothold, and watch HIV/AIDS rise up with greater force.

Gather your weapons: http://www.bloodwatermission.com/AIDS, http://2015quilt.com

TAGS: Blood:Water, Faith, HIV/AIDS, ONE