Dear America,
We weren’t always friends.
It started off so innocently. A skinny Chinese boy, a West Australian town, and a dream by the name of John Starks, who wore a flat-top with his #3 New York Knickerbockers jersey during the early nineties. Later in life, I would grow to stand nowhere close to John’s muscular six-foot-five frame nor ever to gain the opportunity to be royally shat upon by Michael Jordan each playoff series, but you, good ma’m, were the Mother of All Things Cool, and John Starks was your most glorious son. Throw in Guile from Street Fighter 2, a kitchen-handy Colonel named Sanders, and $200 AU Reebok Pump sneakers and you were at once my Lady of the Night and super-hot babysitter, all rolled up together. If Australia was the tangible and immediate—sand grains in my pants from the beach, ‘No Hat, No Play’ schoolyard totalitarianism and kids with hair so light they bleached white during summer—then you were the surreal.
But really, thanks for (1) John Starks. He was, ineffably, the man.
Such slavish devotion at your altar of manufactured cool only grew in depth as the tortured pains of immigrant adolescence set in. I felt anger—(3) Kurt Cobain provided its sonic outlet. I hated Aussie grit—your blockbusters provided the glam. I lusted for classmates—Sharon Stone’s legs (4 and 5) sat down in a chair for interrogation (the rest is history). For every emotional pull and timorous impulse to push boundaries a 13-year-old with a diary might feel, you provided all the catharsis, pop psychology, and heart-warming cinematic dialogue I could have asked for, like a virtual Gaia from (6) Captain Planet (which in its own wonderfully absurd way, offered a pre-cursor to globalized youth activism of which I’ve actually taken to heart). However, this only hinted at the sort of religio-emotive intimacy we began to acquire following the release of Ally McBeal to broadcast television.
Having a grand total of two television stations in my hometown meant pickings were slim. However, it also meant that you developed abnormally obsessive relationships with prime time characters from David E. Kelley comic dramas, particularly those involving thin, flakey lawyers and their zany colleagues. So whereas less stunted viewers may have cooled to Ally’s limited array of “over-active” imaginative antics, I chose to travel another route. I began to become Ally McBeal. Not so much in terms of wan smiles and mini skirt suits—alas, gender roles and Anglican private schools appear only faint acquaintances—but mental excursions. Annoying kid on the bus? Cue Vonda Shepherd’s “Shoop Shoop” song and I was a million miles away, walking imagined snow-lined sidewalks as Bostonian suits admired my cheekbones. Don’t know how to dance? Watch Calista Flockhart and make like you’re the dancing baby.
I’ve since been told the story of one young woman who quit law upon discovering that her firm did not possess curious little men with vocal tics. To which I might reply: “Oogga Chaka, Oogga Chaka!,” “Snappish!”, or “Law and love are the same - romantic in concept but the actual practice can give you a yeast infection,” depending on my mood.
So thank you for (7) Ally, or at least, her team of scriptwriters.
On my very first highly anticipated trip to visit you, I had (8) two sixteenth birthdays. I suppose that has more to do with Greenwich Meantime than it does Los Angeleno hospitality, but I’ll take it.
On the same trip, whilst taking my first baby steps around the country--the Chinese Mann theatre, downtown Minneapolis, the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum, etc.—I found my journey to be thoughtfully soundtracked by the Backstreet Boys, and their irrepressible ballad: (9) “I Want it That Way.” During every cab ride, whilst entertained by each Marriott Inn television channel, you constantly opined that I was “your fire,” occasionally even “your one desire” (growl!), and it seemed at the time that both of us wanted it to be that way. Again, I think a Swedish fellow wrote that tune but I’m giving you all the love this year.
And then my family actually moved here.
When it occurred to me that the transition from the idyllic, pop culture-soaked realm of my youth into the murky, uncharted territories of transnational migration--with its clique-tastic (-1) public high schools and dystopian pre-existential loneliness--was not going to be remotely as charming as Ally’s relationship with ex-boyfriend Billy, nor somehow as romantically destructive as Kurt’s relationship with (-2) Courtney Love, I did not react particularly well. My junior year of high school was a harrowing mixture of peer rejection in which I alternated awkwardly between efforts at choking back my then-purebred rural Australian accent, and attempting to cash it in with various social groups like one might a little red Monopoly house:
“I’ll say ‘Fosters: Australian for beer!’ three more times; then you have to invite me over after school,” went the invisible screenplay;
“Fair dinkum, G’day mate, yes, bloody well…’shrimp on the barbie’: can we make out now?,” I would practically venture like a scene from Annie Hall, though uniformly without success.
I am now desperately attempting to maintain intimacy with my mother tongue, if for little more than the popular and occasionally awe-inspiring approval it wins from (+5 = 11) American women.
I recall the moment I was cleaning syrup off of bottles during recent tenure as a waiter, when during our conversation, one of the more sensual of my fellow wait staff let slip:
“Can you just keep talking…it really turns me on.”
Now as a straight, blood-flowing male I must say that I have never felt quite as immortal, quite as Zeus-esque, quite as wondrously close to the Himalayan heights of He-man majesty previously known only by the James Deans and Steve McQueens of our world as I did that otherwise mundane evening. There are many more sensible, readily quotable reasons to enjoy American society; say: (12) socio-economic upward mobility, (13) the overthrow of WASPish old money cultural hegemony, or (14) the man who invented wikipedia as off-the-cuff examples. But in all truthfulness, it is your magical ability to take what at face value is a particularly coarse, vowel-mutilating, ‘R’-tone erasing distant nephew of the English language, most heavily influenced by both convict descendents and gold miners, and to transubstantiate it into something that is (15) marketable, (16) inimitable (By God you have tried…and oh how you have failed), and…the thought still defies rationality: (17) SEXY, which causes this humble servant to kneel down at the temple of flesh and cry out in gasping awe:
“Thank you CROCODILE DUNDEE.”
But, unbelievably, there was a time when we clashed, Ms. America, so badly that I actually tried ceasing relations.
Somewhere between the (-1) Fox News Channel (despite it being technically owned by an Australian), the majority of Red state inhabitants’ (-2) moral efficacy and (-3) dress sense, and the (-4) competency levels of the current administration, we had a sizeable fall out.
“That’s it,” I told myself. “I don’t like America. Hell, why don’tcha just call me Anti-American, Pat Robertson,” I resolved, as I dived into “Cuba’s Great!” pamphlets from Socialist tables by the student union, staged sit-ins in the name of (+10 =18) Rachel Corrie, and declared my allegiance to the world of snooty, more-lifestyle-conscious-than-thou Chomsky devotees known as the “activist college student.” If there was an IMF protest on a Saturday--I was there; a spoken word coffeehouse talkshop on ecological anarchism or the evil excesses of non-biodegradable deodorant? It took top row in my Slingshot journal.
And yet it was only following backpacking trips through the former Soviet bloc and post-occupation Timor-Leste, during which I grew to love what the Atlantic Monthly describes as the “American Ideal.” Much lovelier than a simple dream, it championed the circuitous route over the path most straight in the name of political pluralism and minority dissent. It is the ability to transform cycles of pure Black sound, often borne of oppression and tumult (the Blues and Hip-Hop), into something universally profound and necessary (the anti-passiveness ability to “rock out” and “get down” respectively). And today, it is the current archetype of post-modern modernity: the (19) Bourgeois Bohemian Renaissance woman. We now have a generation of ultra-overachieving yuppies throughout the neo-New Worlds of East and South Asia, whose ability to balance modern art with chai tea, and go-small gardening with investment banking, was largely guided by one tome of choice, written by a soft-spoken Jewish columnist for the (20) New York Times (who happens to live 10 minutes drive from my work.)
It’s a gradual process, Ms. America, but one whose gentle pace I have come to savor. Every time I buy a platter of pupusas and flautas down the road from (21) Letty of Guatemala in my hackneyed Spanish, each time somebody reveals to me the ethnic history of a Brooklyn neighborhood, we grow a little closer.
And yet for each new friend with whom I swap family sagas of migrant struggle (the generations usually only go no more than thrice), there is a new Minuteman or Ku Klux Klan revivalist organizing against women and men who risk their lives for the very same dream that these nativists’ ancestors once dreamt. This, along with your notion of cardboard-packaged, installable democracy, is your most insoluble contradiction, and one that I firmly believe we shall overcome.
Several months ago, as my Southwest Airlines plane descended toward Baltimore-Washington International Airport, I looked out upon a landscape familiar to many: fresh suburban sprawl and endless lines of SUVs pulling through drive-thru Krispy Kremes, concrete box Walmart stores and gas stations…in essence: the clean, uncompromising face of Middle America. And where before I might have reacted with uppity distaste, burying my face in a New Yorker or spilling Kundera-aping stanzas across an iBook screen, instead I felt the unanticipated, gnawing sensation of a smile, spreading itself ever so gradually across my face.
Upon which it occurred to me that: No, I am not coming home. I know where home lies, and it’s a long way away from Washington DC. But this time, I was returning to a place that I no longer seem to mind, that I might even say I rather enjoy. And now, one day before I move into a rowhouse ensconced with African-American neighbors on the doorstep of the (22) Capitol building, and four days before the two of us celebrate our respective births (Mine: 22nd, Yours: 230th), I am ready to speak the phrase that too many young liberals find so difficult to form in their mouths:
“America, I love you.”
Thursday, June 29, 2006
Monday, June 19, 2006
Podcast 4: The Booty has been Upturned…
In a recent article for New Yorker, Sasha Frere-Jones—to my eyes, pop’s finest contemporary critic—describes what he calls “Americans’ fitful appetite for British pop.’
It made for nice timing, as I have long been an ardent enthusiast of the grand tradition of British rock music, as it seems, is much of the collegiate culturati of Anglo-America, and understandably so: the wordy, nervy character that has come to define much recent british guitar pop is often melodramatic in tone and linguistically region-specific, highly endearing qualities to those for whom the names Chaucer and Blake evoke more cheer than fear.
Frere-Jones argues that American audiences will swallow only that which is uplifting and self-helpish in tone, such as saccharine chaps like Coldplay or James Blunt. As he writes: “If your songs are cynical, ironic, or misanthropic, and loaded with references to Tesco or ‘tracky bottoms tucked in socks,’ Americans may simply turn the dial.”
There are several blips in pop history’s eventful turns that stand out in opposition to this argument. U2, they of the humungous, One-life, elevating choruses for those who know that sometimes they can’t make it on their own, falls clearly in Jones’ favor. But how does he explain the continued popularity of Radiohead, miserablist Oxford experimentalists who remain undoubtedly the most important rock band of our epoch, and whose American popularity—though far more extensive outside of the States—is well beyond anything definable as “cult status.”
Moreover, the tone of much post-Smiths State-side rock: the schools of grunge, rap-rock, and emo-pop respectively, owe far more to the melodramatism and alienated existential crises that Robert Smith and Morrissey articulated to such potent effect during the mid-80s, than to the excess and experientially-focused modes of psychedelica and jam, prog-rock or pop-metal which came before them. Indeed, Kurt Cobain, who so memorably covered the then-obscure Scottish band the Meat Puppets during his seminal Unplugged concert, can be seen as a Seattle antihero of distinctly British attribute.
But enough pontification…here’s the music already: Welcome to a world of British music you may or may not have met yet:
ITSLATEAGAIN: Podcast 4 – Britain’s Booty.
Featuring the Manics, Arctics, a countrified Stereophonics gem, Sandanista-era Clash, and a song from perhaps my favorite record of the 90s: “Different Class,” by Pulp.
It made for nice timing, as I have long been an ardent enthusiast of the grand tradition of British rock music, as it seems, is much of the collegiate culturati of Anglo-America, and understandably so: the wordy, nervy character that has come to define much recent british guitar pop is often melodramatic in tone and linguistically region-specific, highly endearing qualities to those for whom the names Chaucer and Blake evoke more cheer than fear.
Frere-Jones argues that American audiences will swallow only that which is uplifting and self-helpish in tone, such as saccharine chaps like Coldplay or James Blunt. As he writes: “If your songs are cynical, ironic, or misanthropic, and loaded with references to Tesco or ‘tracky bottoms tucked in socks,’ Americans may simply turn the dial.”
There are several blips in pop history’s eventful turns that stand out in opposition to this argument. U2, they of the humungous, One-life, elevating choruses for those who know that sometimes they can’t make it on their own, falls clearly in Jones’ favor. But how does he explain the continued popularity of Radiohead, miserablist Oxford experimentalists who remain undoubtedly the most important rock band of our epoch, and whose American popularity—though far more extensive outside of the States—is well beyond anything definable as “cult status.”
Moreover, the tone of much post-Smiths State-side rock: the schools of grunge, rap-rock, and emo-pop respectively, owe far more to the melodramatism and alienated existential crises that Robert Smith and Morrissey articulated to such potent effect during the mid-80s, than to the excess and experientially-focused modes of psychedelica and jam, prog-rock or pop-metal which came before them. Indeed, Kurt Cobain, who so memorably covered the then-obscure Scottish band the Meat Puppets during his seminal Unplugged concert, can be seen as a Seattle antihero of distinctly British attribute.
But enough pontification…here’s the music already: Welcome to a world of British music you may or may not have met yet:
ITSLATEAGAIN: Podcast 4 – Britain’s Booty.
Featuring the Manics, Arctics, a countrified Stereophonics gem, Sandanista-era Clash, and a song from perhaps my favorite record of the 90s: “Different Class,” by Pulp.
Sunday, June 04, 2006
Podcast 3: Our Issue, Our Fight
Hello listener,
After a week of international negotiation advocacy craziness, I hereby present:
ITSLATEAGAIN...The Podcast! 3: Our Issue, Our Fight.
Being an UN-themed podcast, it's got an international feel to it, and being somewhat celebratory: happy songs. The competition, which was won by a colleague, has been replaced with long stories involving protest elation, and after far too much amateur editing, a final call-to-arms above a Bloc Party remix. Look for some Arcade Fire, Marvin Gaye, and more of that delectable Zap Mama, back by popular demand!
Indulge me, and join the mission. The global AIDS advocacy movement is just warming up.
Love,
Mark
After a week of international negotiation advocacy craziness, I hereby present:
ITSLATEAGAIN...The Podcast! 3: Our Issue, Our Fight.
Being an UN-themed podcast, it's got an international feel to it, and being somewhat celebratory: happy songs. The competition, which was won by a colleague, has been replaced with long stories involving protest elation, and after far too much amateur editing, a final call-to-arms above a Bloc Party remix. Look for some Arcade Fire, Marvin Gaye, and more of that delectable Zap Mama, back by popular demand!
Indulge me, and join the mission. The global AIDS advocacy movement is just warming up.
Love,
Mark
UNGASS Youth Wrap
UNGASS Blog 9: From Inclusion to Leadership
I am on my way back to Washington, rolling away from the rollicking clatter of New York City and the seat of international administration at which over the past week, dozens of brilliant young activists have made their presence felt as profoundly as possible. As didactic and occasionally enthralling as the meeting was, I can’t seem to shake the lingering sense of disappointment at the ultimately mediocre strength of the session’s results. The final political declaration to come out of the 2006 UNGASS review was a mixed bag; encouragingly, it included the strongest youth language ever seen in such a document, as well as a demand for national targets (if not specific quantitative nor global ones) and some mention of putting life before intellectual property rights through access to generic drugs.
Paragraph 26 reads: “(Therefore, we) commit to address the rising rates of HIV infection among young people to ensure an HIV-free future generation through the implementation of comprehensive, evidence-based prevention strategies, responsible sexual behaviours, including the use of condoms, evidence-and skills-based, youth specific HIV education, mass media interventions, and the provision of youth friendly health services.”
Though it fails to mention comprehensive sexuality education, which would have undoubtedly been preferable to “youth specific HIV education,” this paragraph at least allows civil society and non-state actors to push national governments as close to full accountability as possible.
On a less positive note, the declaration fails to make explicit mention of specific at-risk communities, including Men who have Sex with Men (MSM), preferring to use the politically ambiguous term “vulnerable groups.” It also makes mention of “cultural values” in a warping of their original use, in order to allow particular regimes to continue to ignore and repress groups based on ideology, rather than public health or human rights. The declaration does not commit states to reaching the necessary goal of $23 billion USD by 2010, merely calling for signed states to “ensure that new and additional resources are made available.” Finally, the document does not make mention of universal access, a visionary step pushed by the UN since 2001 which is deserving of full political support.
Despite these setbacks, and make no mistake, these are definite setbacks whose exclusion will certainly hinder a truly effective response to global AIDS, I have been filled with a sense of optimism that Harriet, the middle-aged fabric designer I met at a diner across from the UN, considers simply youthful naiveté.
It is an optimism that I derived in-part after speaking to a young HIV-positive homosexual man from the South Bronx who got arrested inside the US Mission through an act of courageous civil disobedience, when he told me: “Now I know…I have the right to do this, and I can do this.”
It is an optimism borne from observing and participating in a number of spectacularly intense and provocative meetings of civil society: where immensely influential veteran activists—such as Eric Sawyer of Act Up and Asia Russell of Health GAP—teamed with a range of professionals from throughout the global south, to analyze, critique, and demand more from the bureaucratic process of disappointing compromise that the UN is renowned for, whilst equipped with nothing more than the weapons of tenaciousness, outrage, and moral agency.
An optimism that witnessed fellow youth advocates take media center stage with grace and aplomb, be they Deidre of Memphis, Tennessee on CNN International, or Nino Susanto of Jogyakarta, Indonesia on BBC World, entering the stage of public affairs with a vigor and intelligence that our generation may possess in abundance, but which the world continually fails to fully utilize.
HIV/AIDS is a treacherous, venomous disease, a devastatingly dark pestilence whose life-stealing enormity far outweighs that of any other phenomenon, natural or man-made, in human history. There are numerous countries, some within Sub-Saharan Africa, in which it has already reconfigured and ravaged the natural cycle of our species—robbing societies of an entire generation of young leaders and breadwinners. If HIV is to destroy us in such a way, reversing many centuries of progress in global prosperity, longevity of life, and the struggle for social justice: it will not be because of the superior biological nor mutational ability of the disease itself. It is well-known that we have effective antiretroviral therapy which allows for the prolonged, healthy life of people living with HIV/AIDS, and that such drugs can be produced for less than a dollar a day. In similar fashion, progress in the development of preventive microbicides, which are critical to the empowerment of women and girls, more potent treatments, and ultimately, a permanent cure, is well within the reach of modern medicine as well as society’s final realization of health as a human right.
No, humankind shall not be defeated by the HIV virus, but only by humankind ourselves. If we allow the unfettered greed of the pharmaceutical industry, which spends less on research than it does on advertising, whilst profiting in far greater excess than both combined; or the hateful ideology of discrimination due to sexual orientation, race, or class to persist in modern society; or the myopic trappings of political relations, mainstream apathy, and inexcusable inaction to come between humankind and the conquest of its greatest challenge to date, than it shall be a hellish self-fulfilling descent upon which humanity is tumbling.
I firmly believe that this shall not be the case.
I believe that my generation, in partnership with and in the spirit of past social movements that have come before us, shall not allow a mere lack of political will to defeat us. Over the past week, I have been blessed to partake in a bounty of inspiration and action, as youth summit members rallied their national delegations, excelled on official panels, and led the shouts of protest from within the very heart of the United Nations, the General Assembly Hall. This group of individuals: women and men; lesbian, bisexual, gay, transgender, still deciding, and straight; Southern and Northern, short and tall; empowered and impatient, will wait no longer for their leaders to take decisive action to prevent new infections and provide access to treatment immediately.
We are Kuntal Krishna of India, who moved Mrs. Annan to visible effect when sharing the story of a 15-year-old HIV victim from his home, whom asked him to the Secretary-General’s wife with a painting of her deceased relatives. We are Keesha Effs of Jamaica, whose blistering presentation on the feminization of HIV shook UN delegates into congratulatory reverie. And we are Naina Dhingra of the United States, whose unyielding strength of character and mastery of the political process provides young people with a true leader at the highest levels of administration. As Incia Khan, a Pakistani-Canadian coordinator for the Global Youth Coalition on HIV/AIDS so eloquently stated: “We must be the generation of change.”
Jan Eliasson, President of the UN General Assembly, issued the following call to all signatory states during the closing remarks of this week’s meeting: “Take this Declaration, and take the new spirit and understanding of these three days, back to your countries, and implement it.”
It is up to us to make sure that they do just that.
I am on my way back to Washington, rolling away from the rollicking clatter of New York City and the seat of international administration at which over the past week, dozens of brilliant young activists have made their presence felt as profoundly as possible. As didactic and occasionally enthralling as the meeting was, I can’t seem to shake the lingering sense of disappointment at the ultimately mediocre strength of the session’s results. The final political declaration to come out of the 2006 UNGASS review was a mixed bag; encouragingly, it included the strongest youth language ever seen in such a document, as well as a demand for national targets (if not specific quantitative nor global ones) and some mention of putting life before intellectual property rights through access to generic drugs.
Paragraph 26 reads: “(Therefore, we) commit to address the rising rates of HIV infection among young people to ensure an HIV-free future generation through the implementation of comprehensive, evidence-based prevention strategies, responsible sexual behaviours, including the use of condoms, evidence-and skills-based, youth specific HIV education, mass media interventions, and the provision of youth friendly health services.”
Though it fails to mention comprehensive sexuality education, which would have undoubtedly been preferable to “youth specific HIV education,” this paragraph at least allows civil society and non-state actors to push national governments as close to full accountability as possible.
On a less positive note, the declaration fails to make explicit mention of specific at-risk communities, including Men who have Sex with Men (MSM), preferring to use the politically ambiguous term “vulnerable groups.” It also makes mention of “cultural values” in a warping of their original use, in order to allow particular regimes to continue to ignore and repress groups based on ideology, rather than public health or human rights. The declaration does not commit states to reaching the necessary goal of $23 billion USD by 2010, merely calling for signed states to “ensure that new and additional resources are made available.” Finally, the document does not make mention of universal access, a visionary step pushed by the UN since 2001 which is deserving of full political support.
Despite these setbacks, and make no mistake, these are definite setbacks whose exclusion will certainly hinder a truly effective response to global AIDS, I have been filled with a sense of optimism that Harriet, the middle-aged fabric designer I met at a diner across from the UN, considers simply youthful naiveté.
It is an optimism that I derived in-part after speaking to a young HIV-positive homosexual man from the South Bronx who got arrested inside the US Mission through an act of courageous civil disobedience, when he told me: “Now I know…I have the right to do this, and I can do this.”
It is an optimism borne from observing and participating in a number of spectacularly intense and provocative meetings of civil society: where immensely influential veteran activists—such as Eric Sawyer of Act Up and Asia Russell of Health GAP—teamed with a range of professionals from throughout the global south, to analyze, critique, and demand more from the bureaucratic process of disappointing compromise that the UN is renowned for, whilst equipped with nothing more than the weapons of tenaciousness, outrage, and moral agency.
An optimism that witnessed fellow youth advocates take media center stage with grace and aplomb, be they Deidre of Memphis, Tennessee on CNN International, or Nino Susanto of Jogyakarta, Indonesia on BBC World, entering the stage of public affairs with a vigor and intelligence that our generation may possess in abundance, but which the world continually fails to fully utilize.
HIV/AIDS is a treacherous, venomous disease, a devastatingly dark pestilence whose life-stealing enormity far outweighs that of any other phenomenon, natural or man-made, in human history. There are numerous countries, some within Sub-Saharan Africa, in which it has already reconfigured and ravaged the natural cycle of our species—robbing societies of an entire generation of young leaders and breadwinners. If HIV is to destroy us in such a way, reversing many centuries of progress in global prosperity, longevity of life, and the struggle for social justice: it will not be because of the superior biological nor mutational ability of the disease itself. It is well-known that we have effective antiretroviral therapy which allows for the prolonged, healthy life of people living with HIV/AIDS, and that such drugs can be produced for less than a dollar a day. In similar fashion, progress in the development of preventive microbicides, which are critical to the empowerment of women and girls, more potent treatments, and ultimately, a permanent cure, is well within the reach of modern medicine as well as society’s final realization of health as a human right.
No, humankind shall not be defeated by the HIV virus, but only by humankind ourselves. If we allow the unfettered greed of the pharmaceutical industry, which spends less on research than it does on advertising, whilst profiting in far greater excess than both combined; or the hateful ideology of discrimination due to sexual orientation, race, or class to persist in modern society; or the myopic trappings of political relations, mainstream apathy, and inexcusable inaction to come between humankind and the conquest of its greatest challenge to date, than it shall be a hellish self-fulfilling descent upon which humanity is tumbling.
I firmly believe that this shall not be the case.
I believe that my generation, in partnership with and in the spirit of past social movements that have come before us, shall not allow a mere lack of political will to defeat us. Over the past week, I have been blessed to partake in a bounty of inspiration and action, as youth summit members rallied their national delegations, excelled on official panels, and led the shouts of protest from within the very heart of the United Nations, the General Assembly Hall. This group of individuals: women and men; lesbian, bisexual, gay, transgender, still deciding, and straight; Southern and Northern, short and tall; empowered and impatient, will wait no longer for their leaders to take decisive action to prevent new infections and provide access to treatment immediately.
We are Kuntal Krishna of India, who moved Mrs. Annan to visible effect when sharing the story of a 15-year-old HIV victim from his home, whom asked him to the Secretary-General’s wife with a painting of her deceased relatives. We are Keesha Effs of Jamaica, whose blistering presentation on the feminization of HIV shook UN delegates into congratulatory reverie. And we are Naina Dhingra of the United States, whose unyielding strength of character and mastery of the political process provides young people with a true leader at the highest levels of administration. As Incia Khan, a Pakistani-Canadian coordinator for the Global Youth Coalition on HIV/AIDS so eloquently stated: “We must be the generation of change.”
Jan Eliasson, President of the UN General Assembly, issued the following call to all signatory states during the closing remarks of this week’s meeting: “Take this Declaration, and take the new spirit and understanding of these three days, back to your countries, and implement it.”
It is up to us to make sure that they do just that.
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