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Via Workers World News Service
Reprinted from the Jan. 4/11, 1996
issue of Workers World newspaper
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Battles in the class struggle take place on many fronts and in various locales. When they take place in New York they invariably have national import--because New York is the world headquarters of finance capital, because it has such a big concentration of workers and oppressed people including the biggest Black community in the country, and because for these reasons it is an important political center.
The country's biggest gay community is also in New York. Together, the gay, Black and Latino communities have been hit extremely hard by the AIDS epidemic. There have been more AIDS cases in New York than in any other city. If this society weren't based on the drive for profit, that would be a demographic fact only. A public-health system dedicated to public health would take it into account in planning a war against the epidemic.
But here's where all those other factors come into play. There is no planned, coordinated, fully funded war against the epidemic--but there is a war against people with AIDS. It is a racist, sexist and anti-gay war, a war against the poor and oppressed, and therefore part of the war between the classes.
Of course, this struggle goes on all around the country. But the ruling class in New York has for several years dedicated particularly vicious energy to one site: the public schools. The latest attack came Dec. 20, when the school board voted to adopt a new AIDS curriculum that prohibits educators from demonstrating condom use to high-school students. Angry AIDS activists disrupted the meeting, calling the right-wing board majority "murderers."
That epithet is no exaggeration. The rate of HIV infection in New York continues to rise, disproportionately among the young people of color who make up the majority of public-school students. Telling young people not to have sex--which is the "education" the board voted for--will not save their lives. Showing them how to have safe sex--which for anyone who has sex with a man includes condom use--can.
How can school officials withhold potentially life- saving information from teenagers? Why did the board bow to a set of mores that sacrifices young people at the altar of right-wing reaction and retrograde religious fundamentalism? Why? Because the schools--as much as work places, neighborhoods, city halls and legislatures--are battlegrounds. The class struggle rages on, everywhere and every day. Our side is on the defensive--for now. But that has got to change. It's a matter of life and death.
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