Last Saturday was a particularly memorable World Aids Day for me.

I didn’t wear a red ribbon. I didn’t march in an awareness-raising parade. I didn’t fashion a square for the AIDS quilt. I didn’t sign up to participate in an experimental drug trial for a potential cure. Instead, I reflected and mourned as I watched a CNN special on the ravages of the modern-day plague in Africa and listened to current events commentators enumerate the many devastations of the scourge in black communities, from backwoods Alabama to the chocolate urbanism of the nation’s capital.

AIDS has always held a painful and intriguing resonance for me. The memory of luminaries, respected and loved on the periphery of our community, like Sylvester and Willie Ninja, brings me to pause. The idea that the story detailed in the book The River is real and the notion that longtime activist Boyd Graves is right, together, inspire incalculable ire. I think of the time I met Magic Johnson in 1998 and how healthy he appeared. I wonder what mojo he really got his hands on because his alleged regimen of “fruits, vegetables and exercise” he told me about, almost ten years later, just sounds suspicious. Images of frail black bodies on the Continent flanked by well-fed talking heads make me wonder if this is the latest hip social cause. It makes me hope that this doesn’t turn out like Darfur, with kids inexperienced in pain mindlessly saying “Not on our Watch,” while surfing the Web for trendy Red-wear by the Gap, their mouse guided by a wrist adorned with a green campaign bracelet. I badmouth Kenyan men who pimp their wives for sustenance, staunchly and perhaps self-righteously unmoved by a poverty I have never known.

I am tired of marches. Diatribes about how today’s infected live longer than ever fatigue me.

I think about Rae Lewis-Thornton. I even track the status of folks like Darren James. I have never forgotten the HBO documentary on the now-late Sandra Billups. Her suffering is forever etched into my psyche. And I am haunted by the hell she endured.

I am tired of sexuality being the red elephant in the pulpit. We’d rather listen to sermons about tithing or text messaging than the terrors of this contemporary scourge.

I am tired of reactions rather than action.

Last Saturday was a particularly memorable World AIDS Day for me.

It was the first one without my best friend, Anthony Lamont Cunningham, who lost his battle against the disease on September 5, 2007. He fought until the end. I awake everyday with him on my mind.

I haven’t worn ribbons, marches, sewn a quilt or volunteered for the cause. But in memory of my brother from another mother – and the countless souls called home before a cure was released – who suffered estrangement, denial and physical pain – I take an oath of action.

I’ve been idle too long. With current statistics, each of us likely only has a grace period before our six degrees of separation from AIDS is no more.

BC Columnist K. Danielle Edwards, a Nashville-based writer, poet and communications professional, seeks to make the world a better place, one decision and one action at a time. To her, parenting is a protest against the odds, and marriage is a living mantra for forward movement. Her work has appeared in MotherVerse Literary Journal, ParentingExpress, Mamazine, The Black World Today, Africana.com, The Tennessean and other publications. She is the author of Stacey Jones: Memoirs of Girl & Woman, Body & Spirit, Life & Death (2005) and is the founder and creative director of The Pen: An Exercise in the Cathartic Potential of the Creative Act, a nonprofit creative writing project designed for incarcerated and disadvantaged populations. Click here to contact Ms. Edwards.

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