AIDS: The Need for Compassion

The reports of what was happening to the Ray family of Arcadia, Florida, quickly circulated around the country. Three brothers, all hemophiliacs who had been infected with the AIDS virus from clotting agents given to control their disease, were greeted by a blockade of community resistance when they tried to return to school.

Rallies were held to protest against the three boys' attempt to attend school. Almost half the students boycotted the first day of classes. The school and the family received bomb threats and other threatening phone calls. And finally, the Ray house was gutted by a suspicious fire. The family lost everything--not only their home but even a place to call home.

"This is no longer our home," said the boys' mother, Louise Ray, who had, along with her husband, fought hard to keep her kids in school. Now their voices seemed to admit defeat. They said they hoped to find a new home, someplace where people might accept them. Ricky Ray, who is 10 years old, now lies awake at night crying, blaming himself for the fire that destroyed the family's home, his father reported to a Senate committee in September. "He believes if he hadn't tested positive, the home wouldn't have burned," said Clifford Ray. Ricky, along with his brothers, Robert, 9, and Randy, 8, really wanted to stay in school. They believed that some of the kids were starting to accept them and were feeling better about things before the fire.

Although evidence shows that AIDS cannot be spread by casual social contacts, the country is gripped by fear of this new epidemic among us. As with other epidemics, ignorance and fear become as dangerous as the disease itself.

Some members of Sojourners are health workers who work with AIDS patients. During times of community prayer and worship, they have shared the tragic stories of many lives affected by AIDS and, most recently, of the growing number of children who are becoming infected. The seemingly hopeless plight of AIDS children, whose parents are either dead or dying themselves, and whom almost no one is willing to adopt, has become a powerful symbol of both the deadliness and extreme loneliness of this disease. The same health workers have also shared their struggle with fear, and their colleagues' fear, of contamination from closely caring for AIDS patients.

THERE ARE NO EASY answers to AIDS. Any real cure, we are told, is still years away, while the need for research, public education, and prevention is enormous. On those fronts, the public resources necessary for the task have yet to be committed, due to a lack of political will and the added complication that comes when moral questions and health issues are tragically confused.

In addition to the political and educational commitment needed, what is perhaps most required in such an intensely painful and confusing situation is compassion. That is what we always pray for in our community gatherings whenever the subject of AIDS is raised. Simple compassion is what the country will so desperately need in the difficult years ahead until this disease is eradicated or brought under control. When we don't know all the answers, and can't see the solutions, compassion is usually the best and truest response.

Indeed, compassion is the only conceivable answer to the question we should always ask in this or any other circumstance: "What would Jesus do?" Compassion is not, as some would charge, an easy answer. On the contrary, compassion is the best response precisely when there are no easy answers.

Compassion is just what Ricky, Robert, and Randy Ray needed. And in late September it was reported that the Ray family had found a new home and a school that welcomed the three boys.

Another AIDS-infected child, 15-year-old Ryan White, received a very warm reception when he enrolled as a freshman at Hamilton High School in, ironically, a town called Arcadia in Indiana, a small, rural town north of Indianapolis. In Swansea, Massachusetts, eighth-grader Mark Hoyle, another hemophiliac and little league all-star, experienced the support of his community before he died in October 1986. "I think kids talked their parents into not being afraid," said Mark's father.

Jim Wallis is editor-in-chief of Sojourners.