COLUMN: "Not-So-Obvious Truth"

From Margo Shea's "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised," Fall '92 (Garlic is great -- it strengthens your immune system while it convinces people to keep their distance.) And I even called my mom, looking for a little sympathy. What I got was something like, "Oh, sweetheart, stop complaining -- it could be a hell of a lot worse." She's right. It could be worse. An article in Saturday's Philadelphia Inquirer made me promptly shut my garlicky, complaining mouth. Instead, I tried to imagine what it would be like to believe that I had AIDS for six years, only to be told that I'd been HIV negative the entire time. John Kuivenhoven, a 53-year-old man from the San Francisco Bay Area, believed his doctors when they told him he had AIDS. "He stopped working, suffered the painful side-effects of experimental drugs and waited to die," according to the Inquirer story. Since Kuivenhoven is homosexual, and he contracted a strain of pneumonia common to many AIDS patients, it was assumed that he had the immune deficiency disease. The doctors forgot to test him. Or they thought they didn't need to. I mean, wasn't it obvious? Now, Kuivenhoven is fighting an addiction to prescription drugs and learning to live with the chronic headache, the high blood pressure and the permanent pins-and-needles feeling in his legs that accompanies AZT treatment. The side effects seem a small price to pay when you stand to gain precious years of life that AIDS might otherwise steal away. But what an exorbitant price to pay for just being who you are -- a gay man with a case of pneumonia. Kuivenhoven now pays for his doctors' prejudices, for their tendency to make judgments based on face-value assumptions, their unwillingness to ask questions and their inability to look beyond stereotypes to see the person within. It's not just the doctors of the world that define and judge, and it's not just homosexual men who suffer. We do it all the time -- in public life, in private life, with strangers in the news and with people on Locust Walk. I'm not sure why we try so hard to see the world in black and white, to fit every individual into a defining and confining box. Does it make it easier to deal with the world and the vastly different types of people with whom we share it? Is this why a California jury could acquit white men for brutally beating a black man? Does this make it easy to justify the killing of thousands of Iraqis in the name of justice and democracy? Is this why homeless people are homeless first, and people second? Is this why we question the motivations of white students who volunteer their time in West Philadelphia? Is this why the "diversity education" has become something to laugh at? We judge people all the time -- by the way they look, the way they talk, the people they spend their time with, where they sit and who they sit with. Last week, a woman in my art class said to me, "You're a fine arts major, right?" After I told her that this was the first art class I'd had since eighth grade -- when I'd gotten C's because I couldn't master straight lines -- I asked her why she thought I was. She explained: "Well, you look so artsy, I'd just assumed " At that moment, I wished I was an engineering student. I could have completely overturned her presumptions, and made her look at me -- and maybe even other people -- in a new way. But I'm not an engineer. I am just who I am. Just like everybody else on campus, and like everybody else on this planet. It's impossible to know very much about anyone by looking at them, even if they give off clues about who they are. We are not all the same underneath the skin. There are differences, and reasons for the differences -- where we come from, how we got here, who our parents are and how they raised us, what we believe in and what we don't think about. But it seems like we focus on much more superficial things, and the boundaries are much clearer: living on the Walk vs. off the Walk, homosexual vs. heterosexual, white vs. black, the College vs. Wharton, undergraduate vs. graduate, Republican vs. Democrat these distinctions become definitions. They box us in, taking on more importance than the things which make us who we are. Who we are is more interesting, more complex and much more colorful than the definitions would have us believe. It isn't easy to put aside the desire to define, to take the risk of discovery. But what's the alternative, more Rodney King's and John Kuivenhoven's? And must people like Rodney King and John Kuivenhoven keep getting put in boxes -- seen as victims of a particular time and place, abused by specific individuals? It becomes easy to avoid the truth -- that they are also victims of the way we as a culture define our world and the people in it. Maybe this campus and the world would look different if we defined things in a new way. My mom is usually right. It's true -- things could be a lot worse. But they could be better, too. Isn't that our choice? Margo Shea is a senior Urban Studies major from Meriden, Connecticut. "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised" appears alternate Thursdays.

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