The next day, those same students would disguise themselves as Grim Reapers and raise a death cloud outside Boston’s downtown Park Plaza Hotel. The mission: to join thousands of other protesters demonstrating against President George W. Bush, who was inside the hotel, presiding over a $2,000-per-plate fundraising meal. The message: 40 Grim Reapers, shadowy harbingers of death wielding black PVC piping, were on strike, Bush’s AIDS policies having left them tired and overworked. Calling Bush’s promise to devote $15 billion to AIDS funding by 2008 a mere penny in the bucket, the reapers sarcastically quip that the mounting death toll from the global AIDS pandemic has stretched them to the limit. “We’re pro-death and all,” their press packet reads, “but this is ridiculous.”
It’s a kind of gallows humor that might seem a bit controversial when talking about the sensitive topic of AIDS. But in this election year, when a host of worthy liberal causes are competing with one another for center stage, AIDS activists are willing to go to dramatic lengths to draw attention to their cause. It’s not that their issue lacks the bete noir of today’s college liberalism: irresponsible behavior by George W. Bush. AIDS activists on campus get riled up at the mere mention of Bush’s inadequate funding promises and what they see as his intimate relationship with the pharmaceutical industry. Bush is in bed with the big drug companies, coalition members argue, to the detriment of cheaper, generic “fixed-dose combination” drugs not among the brand names sold by U.S. firms. Not only have the United Nations and the World Health Organization championed these generic drugs as safe and effective, but they are very affordable. Because originator companies don’t sell fixed dose combinations separately, patients take fewer pills for less expense (from six pills a day for $562 a year, according to some estimates, to two pills a day for $270 a year), making it more likely that patients will take their entire dosage amounts. But student activists say that, thanks to its pharmaceutical ties, the Bush administration is ignoring the smart solution to this problem. This, perhaps more than any other issue, makes them eager to eject Bush from the White House on election day.
However, at left-leaning colleges where the Iraq war and cultural causes tend to dominate debate, words like “fixed-dose combination” hardly set students on fire. With this in mind, members of the AIDS Coalition outside the Park Plaza tried to muster some more resonant catch-phrases. Referencing the cushy meal the president was enjoying inside, students chanted “one plate, ten lives; Bush ain’t got no alibi.” But even these words were sometimes hard to make out, thanks in part to an unusual foe: another group of anti-Bush Harvard students. Affiliated with the Boston chapter of Billionaires for Bush, the group that voices its opposition to Bush by satirically cheering the benefits his policies bring to the rich, these protesters yelled, “We’re here, we’re rich, get used to it,” and “No justice? No problem.” Their dramatic flare gave the grim-faced AIDS protestors a run for their theatrical money.
Indeed, the discord outside the Park Plaza could symbolize the greater problem facing student activists protesting the Bush administration’s policies on AIDS. It’s possible that college students are discouraged from joining the fight for more AIDS funding because the situation seems utterly hopeless, and a lot of the rhetoric appeals to our most maudlin sensibilities. Grim Reaper gimmicks aside, the AIDS Coalition can’t seem to muster the kind of satirical catch-phrases that send students into the streets at a moment when American foreign and trade policy gives left-leaning students plenty of other good reasons to fight. Yet there’s something to be said for the sheer urgency of the AIDS cause that, in spite of its complexity, students are still compelled to join the movement, determined to voice their frustration above the crowded cacophony of liberal outrage. These students are convinced that time is running out on the AIDS issue and are willing to do whatever they can to get their message heard in a noisy presidential campaign.
