Once A Year

Today is World AIDS Day. It is a bit of a high holy day for me. I take serious time to think about what my commitment to the AIDS battle is on a local level and how HIV/AIDS ravages communities and the world. It is, by sheer numbers, a global pandemic.

Yesterday I was fortunate enough to be in the room at a luncheon when my friend Greg Hugeback was honored with a local award from the AIDS Service Foundation of Greater Kansas City for exemplary leadership and a volunteer commitment that, in his case, crosses decades.

His words yesterday followed me through the remainder of my yesterday, through last night and into today. “Many of us saw ourselves in their faces and realized we had to do something. If we weren’t part of making things better, we were guilty of making things worse.”

Dead on perfection.

Today I re-up my commitment to an AIDS free world and, sure, we can start with a generation but I plan on moving on from there. The generation I just helped shepherd into college needs to know of the horrors that come with lack of knowledge about a disease that is stoppable. “How are we going to protect a new generation from the horrors we lived through?”, pleaded Greg not twenty four hours ago.

On World AIDS Day my wish is that all of us have a few moments to sit in quiet with our souls and remember that we all have cancer and we all have AIDS and we all have diabetes and we all have mental illness. Because when one of us do, all of us do.

Peace.

p.s. All of these photos are from over fifteen years of working on an event, Mosaic, with Greg Hugeback. AIDS brought us together and I salute him for a job well done. I have written about my time with the AIDS Walk community and my love of that family of volunteers. Read more here.

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