Scare Tactics

When I was in elementary school, they decided it was important that we learn about AIDS. Not all about AIDS, though. We just learned a few select facts. For example, we learned that AIDS is caused by a virus known as HIV. You can have HIV for years before you develop AIDS. If you get AIDS, there is no cure, and eventually it will kill you, often indirectly through something like a common cold that your body, not having an immune system, can't fight off. We learned that you can't get HIV/AIDS from a drinking fountain, and that you can get it from the blood brothers/blood sisters thing, but that isn't the only way. And they taught us some of the symptoms. This is the part of the presentation where I got scared.

They told us that if, for example, somebody had a cold that wouldn't go away for months, that person was certain to have AIDS, and would die a slow, lingering, painful, family-and-friends-infecting death. OK, maybe they didn't actually say all of that. But they did say that a long-lasting cold was one of the symptoms.

I had a cold (or allergies) that had lasted for over a month. I was pretty sure that meant I had AIDS. I didn't know how I might have contracted it, but I suspected some classmate had the virus and sneezed on me or something. I didn't tell anybody because I didn't want them to know that I was slowly wasting away. Get ready for an embarrassing confession: I believed I had AIDS for the next three years, until I was in eighth grade.

And that's why we say that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing.