Born in 1952, I have no direct memory of the 1918 “Spanish Flu” pandemic that took the lives of up to 100 million people. My memory of that disease is a borrowed one from my Aunt Molly who told me the story of how Great Aunt Jo, a baby nurse who worked for wealthy families in Chicago at the time, sterilized bed sheets by putting them in the oven. From reading, what I do know about the disease is that, like earlier history-changing pandemics—the Bubonic Plague, Black Death, Smallpox, Cholera, etc.—the root cause of its rapid and virulent spread was human ignorance.
My first true awareness of the meaning of “disease” came in the late 1950s when a young cousin of my mother, “one of the Weitzel girls,” died of poliomyelitis, which frightened my parents, whose anxiety spread to me and my siblings. There was good reason for their concern: polio was one of the most serious communicable diseases among children in the United States and they had, by 1958, eight of their own. Compared with the Spanish flu, polio was not a history-changing disease but it was a “high-profile” contagion because the vast majority of its victims were children.
Through a clever national fundraising campaign called The March of Dimes (a play on the phrase “The March of Time”), whereby, at Christmas time, children were encouraged to drop a dime into collection boxes, and whose ads featured sweet-faced boys and girls in crutches, public awareness and funding for research soared. Just as parents could see their children in those ads, I too would see one and think “That boy is me!”
A 1957 March of Dimes poster (from Wikipedia).
Following Jonas Salk’s discovery of a vaccine in 1955 and its mass production a couple years later, school auditoriums throughout the country, including the one at Cazenovia Public Grade School, were turned into immunization centers, and that is where students from Saint Anthony’s, the Catholic school I attended, were taken for vaccination. I had never seen so many people before, not even at Christmas mass; the line of parents and children stretched around the room and out the door as we waited to receive a little white Dixie cup of red liquid from one of the two nurses in immaculate white uniforms.
That nation-wide campaign was highly successful one and, within a few years, polio came to be eradicated in the U.S. The drive proved that in battling disease, research and knowledge are essential but just as important is broad public support.
On the way to adulthood, I had other encounters with disease—mumps, measles, and chickenpox—but these were no longer life-threatening. Similarly, after adulthood, and during my first years in Indonesia (1976–1979), I was felled a couple times—once by dengue fever, which was no fun—but much more vivid in my mind still are bouts of food poisoning: one that was caused by a nasty spoonful of sambal petis in Tretes that forced me to spend my weekend there in a thatch-walled toilet that straddled a gurgling stream; another that was due to a potent portion of gudeg outside the Yogya train station which kept me perched over a hole in the floor in the peturasan of my goat-class coach, watching railroad ties speed past my bared bottom all the way to Bandung.
March 1981 working as an escort-interpreter in Washington, D.C., with Adi Sasono (right) and Said Budairy (center). Photo taken by Lukman Harun.
From January to August, 1980, prior to my enrollment in graduate school at the University of Michigan, and during the summer of 1981, I worked as an escort-interpreter for the U.S. Department of State, serving as a guide and translator for official Indonesian visitors. During these weeks-long trips, I visited almost every major city in the country, with each trip always including several days in Washington, D.C. and days of time in New York City and either San Francisco or Los Angeles as well. Official appointments and sightseeing took up much of the day but late at night, after the visitor had his requisite fix of steamed rice for dinner and was ready to retire, I’d explore the urban nightlife: D.C. discos, clubs on Christopher, cowboy bars in the Castro. I met a huge number of people on these trips, many of whom became close friends and some of whom were soon to die.
The first case of AIDS in the United States was announced in June 1981. I remember the summer of that year very well as friends began to report rumors of a “gay disease.” At first it was called “4H”— which did not refer to the organization for rural youth but to “heroin users, homosexuals, hemophiliacs, and Haitians.” The press also called it “GRID,” short for “Gay Related Immune Deficiency.” Not until 1982 did it come to be called AIDS.
Unlike in the 1950s, there was no public outcry for government response to this deadly disease. There was no fundraising campaign making use of cherubic children to soften hearts and wallets; there were only skeletal men whose bodies were covered with blotted purple lesions as well as preachers and popular entertainers calling the disease God’s retribution for sin. Profound government neglect and public apathy can be blamed for the spread of this disease which, thirty years later, has thus far taken the lives of 32 million people.
I came back to Indonesia in September 1981 grateful that I had not contracted AIDS. I was also hopeful that the blatant disregard for human life I had witnessed in the U.S. would not be repeated in my second home, but I was proven to be wrong. In the years to come, leading officials and religious leaders observed blindly as more and more Indonesians died. Moral and god-fearing Indonesians need not worry, they said, because God was on their side. But disease-bearing bacteria are anarchists and atheists who side with no one. And now, in this time of covid-19, in these days of sequester and seclusion, I see from my juxtaposed memories that, as in the campaign to eradicate polio but not in the response to AIDS, hope rests on social solidarity.
John McGlynn
john_mcglynn@lontar.org