I was born right there, smack-dab in the middle of the Twentieth Century.

My parents, like many of the parents of my generation had been born just after the First World War, grew up during the Great Depression, and entered early adulthood fighting the Second World War, and if they managed to slip by that one, Korea would be coming up to eliminate that luck.

Their parents, having been born in the Nineteenth Century, had already experienced all manner of social and economic upheaval of those years as the old world was morphing into a newer one before spending their young adulthood and parenting years fighting a war to end all wars and then having to raise their children through the depression so that they would eventually become old enough to fight in a war that shouldn’t have happened since they had already fought the war to end all of them.

Having gone from horse and buggy to eventually seeing men on the moon, they had also witnessed scientific breakthroughs that were eliminating those ever present diseases that made it necessary to replace the children who died from those illnesses with new ones.

By the time I arrived the big disease we would have to deal with was polio.

Polio was a cloud hanging over the fifties and even if you never knew anyone in an iron lung, you were still familiar with them either through pictures that were everywhere or having to sell those boxes of Christmas cards to raise funds for some youth organization sporting pictures painted by a guy in an iron lung who painted by holding the brush in his mouth. As an aside, let me mention that I never felt empathy for the artist because in order to do those pictures, someone had to remove and replace the brush each time it needed a new color or some cleaning, and replace a brush with one of a different size while handling all the paint without any credit for what he was doing because he was healthy.

Most schools also had a fair number of kids wearing the most cumbersome leg braces invented way before any light metals like aluminum and way before “space-age plastic” who clomped through the hallways and were often treated like what they had was catchy.

In light of their own histories and what they knew of their parents’, when the vaccine to prevent polio was invented, my generation’s parents welcomed the chance to keep their kids from getting a now preventable disease.

We started with needles, first a single one, then the gadget I remember having multiple tiny needles in a bundle where the traditional needle had been,  both often leaving people with a life-long patch of shots on their upper arm. Later we moved on to a sugar cube type vaccine that eliminated the needle completely and then a liquid in a paper shot glass.

Polio died out. Rooms full of iron lungs were emptied and fewer kids in schools had leg braces.

As a kid we no longer feared playing near “Polio Water” which was actually just little pools of still and stinky water that we would find as we played in the swampy woods behind my neighborhood but to which we had assigned a more ominous power.

Some parents had what they considered their reasons to refuse vaccinating their kids and over time we could see the results of that decision.

Within thirty years of my birth a strange disease appeared.

An unknown illness was taking down then Gay Community. It was already in the general population because viruses choose people not political parties or sexual orientations or genders, but because it was first noticed by a doctor whose patients were mostly Gay, it was labelled a Gay Cancer and those not Gay just ignored it while many were happy God was taking the Gays. Since only Gays got, as the belief went, no one else had to0 worry or take the precautions the Gays did.

So, the disease was allowed to spread though ignorance.

There were steps that could be taken to prevent it, but these were often presented in a negative way that made it difficult to ascertain if the advice was genuine or just a way to bring about a desired result of ostracizing a group of citizens for religious and political gain.

I knew many people who followed what the CDC eventually started recommending, but this was not easy since every time AIDS was discussed it was of something willed by God to rid the world of Gay People did not know if the advice was actually good and preventative or simply a way to cooperate with the demise.

I won’t go into the whole ignoring of the pandemic by the government for a long time, but will point out there was some subtle evidence that these doubters were not entirely wrong.

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Before considering the cure or a vaccine, the desire was to find out who had AIDS without any consideration as to what to do with those who might be found to have contracted the virus. The testing was basically voyeuristic as it was leading to no further action beyond knowing who had AIDS with no plan on how to actually deal with it beyond the ignorant discussion of internment camps and quietly leaving the assumed sole victims to die off.

All lives clearly did not matter.

People, assuming they would all be Gay, could be identified and, if certain politicians had their way, eventually rounded up and isolated.

The data from testing may have collected names, but it led to nothing else as for most of the opening years of the AIDS (ongoing) Pandemic, research and government interest was extremely limited.

Eventually, what finally did come of it was to find a way to have people be able to live with it but not to prevent or cure it.

Fear of the traditional treatment by society and its institutions cost lives first as many Gay people doubted, justifiably, the veracity of what was being said and recommended, and others opting to protect freedom (newly gained) rather than follow certain directions from the CDC.  It also cost lives of straight people who viewed any precautions as applicable only to Gay people and naively set themselves up for death.

A huge chunk was taken from my generation.

Being able to say it had done something was enough for the government, however, deaths were reduced because the Gay Community had established protocols that were later adopted by the general population and medical community. Its only being a Gay thing still lingered in the shadows although sometimes it was thrown into the light whenever church attendance and, therefore, church “love-gift” donations went thin.

In hindsight it is clear that more people would have gotten through Polio and AIDS if they had paid attention to the science.

In the case of AIDS there was an underlying current of distrust of those who had oppressed us and who were now telling us their advice was for our benefit, in spite of their initial expressions of joy that we and our Gay kind might be conveniently dying off. Regardless what the reason for following recommendations or rejecting them was, in the end those who had the best chance of hanging in there until a vaccine or cure were found were those who suppressed their suspicions and followed the science.  

It has been thirty years since the initial explosive first decade of the AIDS Pandemic which is now the quiet hum of an air conditioner in the background, heard but not heard, and we have Covid-19.

With Polio there were those like the majority of people who welcomed a way to do what their own grandparents could not do, prevent a child from dying at a very young age because of some disease now preventable. The choice was clear. The number of iron lungs and leg braces became so scarce as to become noteworthy as opposed something that was part of the lay of the land.

With AIDS, bigotry had so influenced how it was approached, that the fear of being lied to in order to speed up the Gay-ocide process cost lives as did the defense of personal freedoms from those who insist that no one has the right to tell them what to do.

I am now in my third pandemic, spaced at thirty-year intervals, and, so, have something to look back on and with which to make comparisons. So far it has been two for two when it comes to avoiding becoming a victim statistic by following the science and what is recommended as a result. I am moving through this third pandemic safely so far.

I could be totally wrong and extremely lucky, but when someone like Anthony Fauci tells me what science has found and, therefore, the best known steps at the moment is to do the following, I’m there.

The next pandemic, if the pattern holds, will come in 2051 and I will either be long gone, or my fantasy of living to 125 will come true and I will be able to see if people had learned anything yet.