Director Lisa Biagiotti
spent two years travelling around the South
interviewing people about AIDS to make a film,
deepsouth.
She found rural AIDS is a bigger and faster-growing problem
than AIDS in center cities,
yet most health and prevention funding goes to urban areas.
The root cause seemed clear to her: poverty.
Here’s some deeper dirt (literally) on rural poverty in the U.S.,
and one thing we know can help with that: distributed solar power,
for jobs, for reduced electrical bills, and for energy independence.
What politician wouldn’t want jobs for their constituents?
The director said the screening at
VSU at the end of November drew more people than the
day before in Little Rock.
There were clearly more than 150 in the audience in Valdosta.
It’s a topic very relevant to here, as
Dean Poling wrote in the VDT 26 November 2012,
Organizers note that Georgia is ranked sixth highest nationally for
its cumulative number of AIDS cases reported through December 2009.
More than 40,000 known HIV/AIDS cases were reported in Georgia as of
2010.
The South Health District’s 10 counties, which include Lowndes and
surrounding counties, report 950 confirmed cases of HIV/AIDS, while
many more are likely infected and risk becoming sick because they
are not being treated. More specifically, there are about 460
reported cases in Lowndes County.
In reporting these numbers, HIV is the virus (HIV disease) and AIDS
is the medical diagnosis made by a doctor of the symptoms, according
to South Health District.
It’s a great movie and I highly recommend it.
Director Biagiotti spent a substantial amount of her own money and two years to make
this film, yet there are aspects she could only note in passing,
such as incarceration.
She can’t be expected to have researched every aspect;
maybe somebody else can step up and help follow more threads.
The movie starts with some maps about poverty and AIDS in the South.
It did not, however, look outside the South for poverty.
Here are better
poverty maps, from the CDC:
Continue reading →
I hate to agree with the VDT, but I do with this editorial of 8 February 2013,
The importance of ‘showing up’,
distraction from the real thing you want to do. There are a million distractions and when I was a kid I was very disciplined. I knew that the other kids weren’t. I was the one able to do the thing, not because I had more talent, maybe less, but because they simply weren’t applying themselves. As a kid I wanted to do magic tricks. I could sit endlessly in front of mirror, practicing, practicing, because I knew if you wanted to do the tricks you’ve got to do the thing. I did that with the clarinet, when I was teaching, I did that with writing. This is the most important thing in my life because I see people striking out all the time. It’s not because they don’t have talent, or because they don’t want to be, but because they don’t put the work in to do it. They don’t have the discipline to do it. This was something I learned myself. I also had a very strict mother who was no nonsense about that stuff. She said ‘If you don’t do it, then you aren’t going to be able to do the thing.’ It’s as simple as that. I said this to my daughter, if you don’t practice the guitar, when you get older you wouldn’t be able to play it. It’s that simple. If you want to play the guitar, you put a half hour in everyday, but you have to do it. This has been the biggest guiding principle in my life when I was younger and it stuck. I made the statement years ago which is often quoted that 80 percent of life is showing up. People used to always say to me that they wanted to write a play, they wanted to write a movie, they wanted to write a novel, and the couple of people that did it were 80 percent of the way to having something happen. All the other people struck out without ever getting that pack. They couldn’t do it, that’s why they don’t accomplish a thing, they don’t do the thing, so once you do it, if you actually write your film script, or write your novel, you are more than half way towards something good happening. So that I was say my biggest life lesson that has worked. All others have failed me.
