IF NOT HERE, IS THE PROBLEM THERE?
HOMETOWN INFLUENCES
When asked on my first east coast visit if people raise sheep in Illinois, the overbearing stereotype of my home as an uncultured heartland astounded me. Perhaps the Midwest lacked the sophistication and fast-paced lifestyle of “The City”; however, I never considered Winnetka, Illinois, to fall into the category of a cultural latrine.
The transition from my overwhelmingly conservative town to Hamilton, New York forced me to swallow my pride and reevaluate my high school education. New Trier, an esteemed public high school, was created and run in a manner that would please the adult community, advocating the same conservative set of values inherent to its North Shore location. Trapped in the bubble of a predominately white, elitist town, AIDS was far removed from my life. I knew nothing about the numbers, the science- let alone any public reaction to AIDS. Why address a global problem when the children weren’t having sex? As a true bubble, the problem was their problem, not ours.
Acknowledging the pandemic on AIDS Awareness Day, my high school administration provided incomparable numbers of people who fall victim to AIDS all over the world, focusing primarily on pictures of emaciated children orphaned as a result of AIDS in African villages. This was truly terrifying and simply unimaginable for a seventeen-year old girl who had never gotten an appropriate sex talk because sex was never going to be an issue. There were a number of speakers that rotated periods throughout the day, none of which stick out in my mind because they all preached the same thing: “I never thought it could happen to me.” This didn’t change my perception of AIDS: a poor disease of a disparate Africa, the inner city homeless, and abandoned drug users. “Get involved. Raise awareness,” they preached. In fear of looking interested in what appeared to be a gay pride parade in front of my peers, I disregarded the panelist’s enthusiasm regarding the annual AIDS walk in Chicago. I regret to say the majority of the student population that day, me included, exited that presentation ignorant and indifferent as ever, gaining nothing more than statistics estranged in our minds.
As my own cultural latrine, I reinforced the social rift between the Midwest and both the coasts. With no conceivable knowledge of the world’s most deadly and exponential syndrome, I drew a blank when asked to approximate the number of cases diagnosed in Winnetka since 1980.
Take a moment and step into the ignorant mind of a clueless north shore teenager trying to make a good impression on her first day of class: there are millions of AIDS cases in Africa, so proportionally, there must be at least ten cases diagnosed a year. AIDS in Winnetka must obviously be like the undisclosed sex talk in my house: Parents would never talk about their HIV infected children for fear of looking irresponsible; afraid to condone morally scandalous sexual practices or to sanction drug use with the homeless black man from the south side, they chose to stay quiet. Talk about first impressions.
With my ignorance completely and utterly exposed, I heavily misdiagnosed the problem of AIDS in my hometown. I predicted there had been two hundred cumulative cases in Winnetka over the past twenty years, overestimating the problem by one hundred and ninety-one cases. I soon found out that there were an exclusive, and fortunately so, nine cases in my town (7). My preconception of AIDS as a disease of the poor led me to estimate two thousand cases, or ten times more cases as in Winnetka, in Evanston, a significantly larger town only ten minutes away. Still, there were only two hundred and fifty cumulative cases in what I saw to be a primarily black and substantially poorer population than Winnetka, leading me to believe that the AIDS pandemic is truly not a problem in the towns of Chicago’s north shore (7).
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