Let’s never forget….
And keep this in mind as we await the Republican controlled Supreme Courts decision on Health Care Reform (aka Obamacare) tomorrow….
Striking down this legislation will have a great impact on people with pre-existing conditions, including AIDS, and vastly limit access to affordable Healthcare.
From USA Today:
It was on June 27, 1987, when a group of grieving friends and loved ones hung a 40-panel quilt from a balcony in San Francisco to memorialize 40 lives lost to AIDS. Their act inspired thousands of mothers, brothers, friends and lovers to make and send in their own panels and, soon, that quilt became the world’s biggest piece of folk art and the nation’s most tangible symbol of the epidemic.
Today, the AIDS Memorial Quilt contains more than 47,000 panels with the names of more than 93,000 people. Laid end to end, they would stretch more than 50 miles. Displaying the whole thing is such a huge undertaking that it hasn’t been tried since 1996.
But it’s about to be done, in a series of events that begins Wednesday, the 25th anniversary of that first display.
The entire quilt is coming back to Washington, D.C., where it was shown several times between 1987 and 1996. Pieces will be on display during the Smithsonian Folklife Festival, June 27 to July 1 and July 4 to July 8. Then, from July 21 to July 25, organizers hope to roll out every segment of the 54-ton quilt, in stages, on the National Mall and in more than 50 venues around the city, during the International AIDS Conference.
At a time when AIDS is often out of the daily headlines and when treatments make long lives possible for many with the disease, the quilt is a reminder that people with HIV still matter and that the disease still kills, says Julie Rhoad president of the Names Project Foundation, the Atlanta-based custodian of the quilt: “Those who have no access to care are dying rapid, hard deaths and they are invisible.”
More: AIDS Memorial Quilt marks 25 years with display in D.C. – USATODAY.com.
Lost in the 21st Century 