Tens Years Walking by Michael Yoder
September 2004, Volume 7, Issue 9
Victoria is holding its tenth AIDS Walk this year and in all that walking I wonder if anything in this city has changed. The one thing I know is that the attention span of the public is about as long as my cat's - if there's nothing too lurid there's nothing worth noting.
And that's the saddest part of walking for ten years. I have the most vague recollections of people and events from the eighties: some would say that's good - we need to move on now and focus on the "new" epidemic. I think otherwise. If we lose the past, if we cannot recall what happened in our own city, then the present is simply a shadow cast on the sidewalk and once the sun moves it too will disappear.
Who we are now, has a great deal to do with who we were then. The people who came before us - and who left before us - have shaped where we are and what's happening now. To forget that is to say that the good work done today will be as equally useless to those who follow, and who follow those people and those people and the cycle of forgetting will continue.
I never knew everyone from those days: the "AIDS community" isn't a community at all, and a virus is a weak connection, but I remember "Black Paul", and Tommy Taggert, Roy Salonin and Ray Scott. I remember Ken Libby (a panel for him hangs in the lobby at AVI), and Wayne Cook, Ian and Chris, and Kevin Brown. I remember Scott "the Bouncer", Dwayne, Mark, Sheri, Delores, Gary and Steven and Ray B, John and Lisa and Ray T and I've forgotten the names of so many others, even though their faces are firmly etched in my mind. Does anyone hanging out in drop-ins today remember any of those people? Perhaps a few will, but most will have faded into obscurity.
I remember crying. And more importantly I remember laughing. I remember how these people in the face of illness and their deteriorating bodies held to life and loved it for every moment. I didn't like all of them and they didn't like me, but that's beside the point.
The point is to honor and record and remember, in whatever way we can, that these people were here and offered others their love, life, hopes, dashed dreams and hardships. And not to remember anyone as demigods and goddesses as we often do. Their importance in our world was not to be impressive or to build monuments. Their importance was in their simple existence.
Have we got anywhere with all that walking? I think in some ways we have: and I think we have a lot more walking to do.