Forgetting The Past Can Be DEADLY

The young people in nearly every culture doubt us "old people". They wonder where we get our views on cloths, music, and life. They oftentimes think of us as out-of-date and as dull as an old history book. We, the older generation, oftentimes find ourselves saying exactly what our parents and grandparents said just a few short years ago. In fact, when we were young those old people were considered out-of-date and as dull as an old history book. Now us "old" people find ourselves saying and doing exactly what we said we would NOT do when we got "old".

I guess the reason I became, as my children think, "old" was because as I progress through life I notice that what my folks said about life was indeed true. They oftentimes said if I hang around with a bad crowd people will start thinking I am bad as well. Sure enough hanging around with the rough bunch leads to being treated by people as one of those rough ones. After living for awhile I noticed that history does indeed repeat itself. The mistakes we made in my generation the new generation is now making. We do this because we don't really believe those "old" people.

In fact one wise person once said, "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it" (George Santayana (1863 - 1952), The Life of Reason, Volume 1, 1905).

Twenty years ago on June 5, 1981 the Morbidity Mortality Weekly Report described the first five cases of HIV/AIDS in the United States. These patients all got what, at that time, was considered a very very rare cause of pneumonia: Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia. Because of the HIV infection their immune systems were unable to eliminate this very common but relatively harmless microbe.

In the past 20 years 450,000 Americans have died and over 1 million have been infected with HIV/AIDS. However, with several changes in behavior new HIV infections, which peaked at over 150,000 in the mid-1980s, were reduced to an estimated 40,000 a year in the early 1990s. Only a little over 35,000 new HIV infections were reported in 1999 by encouraging safe sexual practices.

Unfortunately, these safe sexual practices are not being followed by young male homosexuals ages 23-29 and as a result a new Centers for Disease Control (CDC) study finds high rates of infection among young gay and bisexual men. The study found that 4.4 percent of young men who have sex with men (MSM), ages 23-29--and 14.7 percent of African-American MSM in this age group--were infected annually in a six-city study conducted between 1998 and 2000.

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