Republicans are having to face a reality in which HIV is no longer just affecting gay people and drug users in big cities, and it’s exposing some uncomfortable realities that were already glaringly obvious, but which people still like to pretend don’t exist.
It wasn’t supposed to happen here. Not in Austin, a one-doctor-and-an-ice-cream-shop town of 4,200 in southeastern Indiana, nestled off Interstate 65 on the road from Indianapolis to Louisville, where dusty storefronts sit vacant and many residents, lacking cars, walk to the local market. Not in rural, impoverished Scott County, which had reported fewer than five new cases of HIV infection each year, and just three cases in the past six years. Not in a state where, of the 500 new cases reported annually, only 3 percent are linked to injection drug use.
But it did. And it could happen in many more backwoods towns just as unprepared as Austin.
As the largest HIV/AIDS outbreak in Indiana’s history roils this Hoosier hamlet, it reflects the changing face of the epidemic in the U.S., as a disease that once primarily afflicted gays and minorities in deep-blue cities rises in rural red states. This new evolution of HIV is also forcing a new generation of Republican policymakers to confront its orthodox opposition to remedies such as government-funded needle-exchange programs.
I’m hung up on that first sentence, “It wasn’t supposed to happen here.”
I can’t tell if the author of this article is using this sentence with any sense of irony at all.
It’s been over 16 years since I first figured out that “It wasn’t supposed to happen here” is an unambiguously horrible thing to say, because it implies that it (whatever “it” is) is supposed to happen somewhere else.
Back in 1999, after the Columbine shootings, the news showed a bunch of b-roll footage of suburban Denver, with variations on “It wasn’t supposed to happen here.” It just seemed glaringly obvious that this isn’t supposed to happen anywhere. The subtext in the media, though, was that this shouldn’t happen in a quiet, peaceful, white area.
Anyway, I usually assume that I’m one of the last people to figure these sorts of things out, but maybe not. “It wasn’t supposed to happen here” seems to be ingrained in our national identity. It even still shows up in response to school shootings.
It sure seems like the prejudices that greeted the early days of the AIDS epidemic—that this was a disease that only affected gays and drug users, who who cares?—are still with us in 2015. Maybe “It wasn’t supposed to happen here” is just part of the same national tradition of denying problems that are only supposed to happen to someone else.
(Adapted from a Facebook comment).
