insurgent49

December 1, 2006
The Least We Can Do
by Lindsay Luckey, insurgent49

Today when I got to work, I was offered a red ribbon sticker to wear on my shirt.

“What’s this for?” I asked.

“It’s World AIDS day.”

“Oh, okay cool.” So I put it on. Hah, clever, I thought … a sticker instead of a ribbon with an obnoxious safety pin.

Pretty much everyone at work wore one. One time, while running through the kitchen, a coworker stopped me and said, “Hey, do you wanna hear something I read recently?”

“Sure, what’s up?”

“Did you know that (horrifyingly high number) of kids in (some day in the not so distant future) will be born with AIDS in (country in Africa)?”

Headshaking and a sad smile were all I could reply with. I had a pit in my stomach thinking about the reality of that scenario.

“Isn’t that awful?” he said.

“Yeah, but you know what’s worse? As soon as I leave this kitchen I’m going to forget that statistic and some more immediate problem will pop up that I’ll have to deal with and then someone will make me laugh and I’ll forget how that made me feel and how strongly I felt that we must do SOMETHING and how future generations will look back and think how could they have not done ANYTHING??”

We realized that because it isn’t an issue which effects us daily or personally that we are able to forget about it, (can you say rising fuel prices and growing interest in renewable energy sources?) Pretty depressing. We can SAY that we care about an issue, but we’re not really making any kind of difference.

As we were parting, I turned back and said, “You know what though … every time I see that red sticker on your shirt today, I’ll remember for a second how that statistic made me feel.”

It was true, especially on a sea of black shirts, the little spot of red caught my eye and while most of the time, I didn’t stop to reflect on how bad the AIDS epidemic is, I did hand out a few red ribbons to those who asked for them. And I told people what it meant to those people who asked what it was for. Another person at work was going to a housewarming/birthday/fundraiser for AIDS party. Three birds with one stone. Why not? It’s so easy to pair helping people with having fun. Plus, people are more generous when they’ve been drinking ...

We are all busy, stressed out, overbooked people who are struggling to keep our own lives afloat. So we need people to help make it easy for us to help out. Because we DO care, we just don’t know how to tackle such a huge problem. Like a sticker instead of a ribbon.
My friend has a beautiful quote on her Facebook profile:

“Individually we are a drop, together we are an ocean” - Ryunosuke Satoro.

Let’s all be a part of the wave.

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