To rally support for the millions across the world tragically suffering and dying from HIV and AIDS, some activists confront audiences with a denial of the right to life. People have a right to the best treatment, they argue. The adversities of life, they seem to say, can be overcome.
But reality is more complicated.
Monday's documentary in the weekly Liberation film festival in the Memorial Union, "A Closer Walk," made the case of the right to life. The film described the global AIDS pandemic as the product of oppression, with a reminder of peoples' rights being the cure.
But the need for action is overshadowed not by a denial of rights, but a lack of compassion. Rather than an abstract appeal to rights, people need a confronting look at those suffering to be compelled to work for the world's sick.
Life is not how the healthy and secure often assume. Its conditions can be hard and cruel. As one young Ugandan girl in "A Closer Walk" bitterly confided, "I felt like I was alone in this terrible world."
The girl, Olivia, had lost both her mom and dad to AIDS, before learning she too had HIV. Her uneducated society and family then abandoned her.
Addressing the world, Olivia admonished people to confront reality, chiding the happy to look at the suffering of others and see how hard life can be. Her seasoned, astute request did not appeal to some ideal right to life, but to the compassion that should follow when a person sees the hardships of others.
But taking a cold, hard look at the conditions of life is not enough to change things. Change requires work and money and caring for others requires sacrifice.
Stepping up to the global AIDS pandemic involves shouldering economic and emotional burden. A right to life does not oblige people to assume this sacrifice; instead, the force of compassion from stories like Olivia's should compel them.
After a person has spent time, resources and energy building a house for his or her family, a right to life does not oblige that person to pick up his or her tools, leave off other pursuits and build another for someone else.
In the same way, in the United States, through labor and money, we have developed treatments for HIV and AIDS that greatly enhance the length and quality of life for those living with them. Intellectual obligation does not now compel us to send such treatments to the people in the world.
We are compelled to because they deserve it, as people worthy of compassion and in a situation that concern for others cannot look past.
Those who speak for the human right to life have assumed the burden of the world's need. But audiences will not be moved by appealing to an abstract right that assumes an innocent ideal of the burden of life and philanthropy.
People will be compelled when they are brought in to look into the wide, tired eyes of one of the thousands of orphans who are born, live out their palm-full of years, and pass away in a hospital bed in parts of Africa. Watching doctors move Olivia's small, sickly frame to dress her, while she remains almost lifeless, will stir people to the sorrowful compassion to help.
After such a sight, these people will rush to act when told that their nation has the medications that could have prevented such a girl from contracting HIV in her mother's womb.
The world is incomprehensively severe in some peoples' lives, and an understatement of that fact will not stir an appropriate concern for others. Lives can be hard, and caring for them takes sacrifice.
But people deserve that effort and care, and a straight look at their trials will stir compassion to speak up and lead a person to action. And while money and medicine may only alleviate hardship, human empathy emerges as the thing that makes life truly endurable.
Reach the reporter: mailto:matthew.bowman@asu.edu.
