SB 239 Yay or Nay?

Oh man, oh man! Do we have an intense project ahead of us or what? 

We have spent the last few days discussing our feature and the many aspects of the project that we need to cover in order to create a beautiful piece of writing. Listening to Ms. Wallace, we learned that a feature is more than just words thrown onto a piece of paper. It is a creation born out of love that takes time, organization, commitment, and persistence. How do you feel about what it takes to write an article?

patheos.com

Senator Scott Wiener is pushing his bill SB 239 to come into effect as soon as possible. “HIV-related stigma is one of our main obstacles to reducing and ultimately eliminating infections,” Wiener said. “When you criminalize HIV or stigmatize people who have HIV it encourages people not to get tested, to stay in the shadows, not to be open about their status, not to seek treatment.” Under the current law, if a person who knows they are infected with HIV/AIDS has unprotected sex without telling their partner they have the virus, they can be convicted of a felony and face years of jail time – 3, 5, or 8 years in prison. Sen. Wiener’s bill will push to change the felony charge to a misdemeanor. This change will treat HIV like other communicable diseases under California law. How do you feel about this bill? Are you morally opposed or aligned with it? Are you in favor or against the bill? What are the bill’s pros and cons? 

Now that we have the nitty-gritty “big government” out of the way, what aspect of the project are you most excited about? Most worried about? Writing a feature length article is no walk in the park, but with enough organization and teamwork, I think we can have a successful and beautiful article. 

Age in Love in the Time of Cholera

Over the past few days, we’ve been delving into Love in the Time of Cholera and exploring some of the themes and connections between (obsessive) love and cholera. I feel Maya’s post asked more than adequate questions (that we started to explore in our discussion this morning) about the relation between the associations of love and cholera, so I thought it’d be beneficial to explore some of the other topics Marquez tackles.

We often see the passage of time, and the fear of death and aging accompanies this. In the beginning of the novel, Jeremiah de Saint-Amour commits suicide out of his fear of becoming old, and suffering as his body fails him. Saint-Amour writes “Each man is master of his own death, and all that we can do when the time comes is to help him die without fear of pain.” This is in contrast to Dr. Urbino, already an elderly man, who takes multiple pills and maintains a strict diet devoid of many of the pleasures Saint-Amour experiences in his life. This is to prolong his life, as it’s fading into monotony. Ironically, the medicines and diet Urbino maintains end up doing nothing to prevent his death as he falls from a mango tree.

Florentino and Fermina also experience this fear of death and aging. For example, on page 119, after Florentino sees his godson (the child of a couple he managed to connect through the love letters he wrote when he was a poet), he’s suddenly hit with a feeling of intense urgency and impending doom, as Marquez writes, “He was shaken by a visceral shudder that left his mind blank, and he had to drop the garden tools and lean against the cemetery wall so that the first blow of old age would not knock him down. “Damn it,” he said, appalled, “that all happened thirty years ago!””

How does this fear of old age and death amongst the characters play into not just the love story Marquez weaves, but also his representation of cholera and its connections with love? This fear of death seemingly contradicts Florentino’s steadfast mission to win over Fermina’s affections - how does he reconcile these two ideas as he ages and still obsesses over Fermina? To go further off of the motif we’ve been exploring, how does Florentino’s romanticization and idealization of his ‘suffering’ for Fermina represent not just his own delusion, but how love has infected him like cholera?

A few more questions just for fun - how do the actions of Florentino compare to the side effects of cholera affecting its patients? Florentino leaves several bodies in his wake, and ruins the lives of multiple women in his quest to win the affection of Fermina. In addition, how can Fermina herself be related to Cholera, and not just love as a whole? Does she only impact Florentino, or is Dr. Urbino also under her spell? After all, Florentino does not attack another ‘patient’ of Fermina (Dr. Juvenal Urbino) - he pities him as another patient, and still focuses on the ‘disease’ - Fermina. He realizes that Urbino must die in order for him to achieve his ultimate goal. How does this affect the parallel between cholera and romance in the novel, and how does this leave Fermina as not just another object of a love story? Even though they are different characters, the actions they commit have noticeable parallels, such as Urbino cheating on Fermina, and Florentino breaking his promise to save his virginity for Fermina - and lying to her when they make love.

Cholera Associations: Love in the Time of Cholera

Last week, we read Gabriel García Márquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera and had a few opportunities to begin thinking as a class about the novel. In our roundup activity, many of us were interested in delving into the connection between love and cholera. We observed that in his infatuation with Fermina Daza, Florentino Ariza’s “anguish was complicated by diarrhea and green vomit, he became disoriented and suffered from sudden fainting spells” (p. 61). After determining that he was medically in fine health, it was concluded “once again that the symptoms of love were the same as those of cholera” (p.62). We noted that both love and cholera can be intense, all-consuming, and rapidly-acting experiences of suffering and that comparing love to cholera provides a concrete framework for discussing an abstract experience. Does Márquez create any other associations with cholera aside from love? What does associating love with cholera indicate about either the characters’ or Márquez’s perception of love?

We were also interested in exploring how the Caribbean setting and culture affect the telling of the story. Is it important that this novel’s narrative of love takes place “in the time of cholera” rather than another disease or another time? Why? In what ways are the civil wars and cholera outbreaks that take place during the novel important to our understanding of the characters, the world they inhabit, and cholera? In considering all of the diseases and their related literature that we have studied, how does the format of Love in the Time of Cholera as a novel provide a unique window into disease and the way it affects people?

Finally, it seems to me that throughout the novel, characters–Fermina in particular–undergo evolving relationships with time and space: their stages of life as they age over time and the different people with whom they share their space. The characters experience changing perspectives on love and their partners as they age. Fermina, for example, initially does “not find even the shadow of a doubt in her heart” (p. 87) about marrying Florentino despite their relationship primarily taking place within the space of written letters, though she rejects him soon after. Later on in her years of sharing physical space with Dr. Juvenal Urbino, she “was not convinced that love was really what she most needed to live” (p.205). However, in the end, she reconnects with Florentino. Why does Fermina reject Florentino initially? What causes her to change her mind at the end of the novel and reunite with Florentino? Is it for love alone, or can it be attributed to other concerns?

The Beginning of Our Cholera Discussion

Having not yet delved into Cholera or Love in the Time of Cholera it is hard to develop thought provoking questions about our discussions over the past week. In the in-class reading, “What the Cholera Epidemic in Sudan Tells Us About the Absurdity of Lifting U.S. Sanctions on Khartoum” we noted that Cholera is a pretty easily preventable disease -- even if moving the water source or changing the plumbing is impossible, simply boiling the water will kill the bacteria in the water. However, we also know that the people lack the resources to have clean water sources and plumbing, let alone boil their water due to corrupted government, and placement of money that should be spent on bettering healthcare and clean resources into the military. We also watched John Snow’s discovery of Cholera as a bacteria transmitted through water by waste from an infected person’s stool. This was a lot different than the Sudanese Cholera epidemic, because unlike Sudan England was, and still is, much more developed and the government allocated resources, funds, and mandates for public health. We watched how Snow had come across what seemed like a problem that would be an easy fix, but ended up being a multi-step process that eventually led to a greater outcome for humanity, but required persistence and perseverance as well as teamwork with someone Snow didn’t necessarily see eye to eye with. Do you think there are ways in which someone or a group of people could develop a plan to alleviate some of the Cholera related issues in Africa? What about health, environmental, and other political issues around the world? According to the World Health Organization there are between 1.3 and 4 million people infected with Cholera worldwide each year, and between 21,000 and 143,000 of those patients die due to lack of treatment or lack of resources for an overall 100% preventable disease. Like Malaria there is a lot of distance between us and where the epidemics of Cholera are, and therefore it doesn’t seem like a pertinent issue. Do you think that this distance deters scientists from developing more accessible cures and working through governmental issues? Or do you think that the epidemics are hard to solve because of the lack of compliance of the African government with providing proper health care and clean water sources?

Mr. Countryman: Letter from an Epidemic

(from Noni)

During the past few weeks we have been studying AIDS as virus, the effects this disease has had on society, and more specifically the people who have contracted it. This week we were given the opportunity to examine a collection of letters written by Peter Countryman, the father of Ms. Countryman, who in 1988 tested positive for AIDS, and battled the disease for four years.

Until this point, many of the texts we have read on AIDS have been focused mainly around homosexuality and unsafe sex, while ignoring other ways that AIDS can be spread. However, we learned that Mr. Countryman tested positive for HIV while battling drug addiction and sharing infected needles. Just like how there are associations made around those who have gotten AIDS from unsafe sex, are there associations made around those who have tested positive due to drug abuse and the sharing of needles? If so, what are these associations?, and do you believe that society views one way of contracting this disease worse than the other?   

Throughout his life, Mr. Countryman was described as a fighter. A fighter for civil rights, a fighter for the protection of migrant workers, and a fighter against violence towards women. He was seen as a “warrior secretly filled with sweetness”pg.1  who protected those who were not given a voice to stand up for themselves. How did these associations surrounding Mr. Countryman affect how he saw himself before and after being infected with this disease?

I am interested in spending more time on specific questions like why do are race and economic standing play a huge role in treating disease? For example, in many instances we noticed that the US does not pay attention to life threatening diseases until they reach us, however during this time, AIDS was a disease in the US which still did not receive the amount of attention in should have. What are some of the major contrasts within the letters? Can aspects of this text be related to any other texts we have read over the course? Also, what was Mr. Countryman's inner vs outer struggle and how did his disease play a role? How can we change society to move away from the idea that asking for help or depending on others is seen as weak? What do you appreciate most about these letters and why? Lastly, how has this text transform your view of AIDS and drug addiction?

Stigma in the AIDS Epidemic

This week, we read Susan Sontag’s “AIDS and Its Metaphors.” Similar to “Illness as Metaphor,” Sontag criticizes the way we talk and think about AIDS and how we picture the disease to be worse than it really is. The metaphorical discussion of AIDS increases the patients’ suffering and creates unnecessary concern among the larger society. Like the discussion of the metaphorical uses of tuberculosis in the 19^th century and cancer in the 20^th from “Illness as Metaphor,” Sontag reveals how language distorts the reality of AIDS and keeps patients from seeking the most beneficial course of treatment.

A strong association people have made with AIDS is homosexuality. During the onset of AIDS in the United States, it most severely affected homosexual men. Sontag claims that because society at the time believed the sexual practice among homosexuals was willful and unnatural, those who contracted AIDS were more deserving of it. She states, “An infectious disease whose principal means of transmission is sexual necessarily puts at greater risk those who are sexually more active – and is easy to view as a punishment for that activity” (Sontag 26). Why was society at the time so quick to point out the flaws of the homosexual community and its practices because of AIDS when they weren't even how the disease originated? Do we still refer to AIDS as a disease of promiscuity today after all the knowledge and scientific advancements that have been made since Sontag’s time period?

Another metaphor Sontag discusses is the thought of AIDS as a plague as opposed to an epidemic. She believes that the plague association represents AIDS as a punishment, similar to how people viewed the Black Death as God’s punishment. The punishment of AIDS is for moral indulgence – a perspective stemming from the disease’s association with homosexual practices, despite the absence of this connection with the disease in Africa where AIDS originated. Sontag adds that the plague image also is detrimental to society because it contributes to a sense of inevitability: “The plague metaphor is an essential vehicle of the most pessimistic reading of the epidemiological prospects. From classic fiction to the latest journalism, the standard plague story is of inexorability, inescapability” (Sontag 141). What is it about the apparent finality of AIDS that makes the disease so intimidating? Sontag admits, “one cannot think without metaphors” (Sontag 93), so regarding the way we think about AIDS, are its metaphors ill or well chosen? Is the disease itself, not the way we talk about it, the true source of fear?

Malaria and the Mosquito

We have learned through Susan Sontag's book, Illness as a Metaphor, how many diseases take on a meaning that suppresses its illness that it inflicts. We have seen through numerous texts how representations and association of devices are internalized in society and the people inflicted. Through our TB, cancer, and plague readings, we have seen how the desire is internalized in society and how it affects other people, however, Conaway brings the interesting perspective of the mosquito through the poem "Silence, Anopheles". In that poem, we see how the mosquito is simply surviving like every other animal and is unaware of the desire it carries inside.  How do our own association of Malaria and the mosquito affect how our society views mosquito ridden places and tropical areas? Are the representations of Malaria only placed on the parasite itself, or is the mosquito closely tied in with the associations given to Malaria? Why or why not? How do the representations of Malaria and the Mosquito affect how researchers and health care professionals approach prevention, treatment, and ultimately trying to find a cure of Malaria? Are there examples in Conaway's' poems that support your answer?