Bus Fumes

Good. Judge Lefkow and her family have been through enough without having to worry about what that bastard is up to for one moment longer.
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Un. Be. Lievable.
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Talk about an ethical dilemna! I don't envy the Mad House Madman this one, and I know whereof he speaks.

Several years ago I did volunteer work as a "support manager" for a person with AIDS (or "PWA") through Howard Brown Health Center here in Chicago. A support manager was basically an advocate for the PWA -- making sure that he or she got whatever support services they needed.

HBHC staff stressed that support managers were under no circumstances to make judgemental statements about the attitudes or actions of our clients to our clients. That was grounds for a "thanks, but no thanks" and an immediate kick to the curb.

Support managers were required to go to a support group for support managers at least once a month and, believe me, sometimes we really needed that support.

For example, one of my fellow support managers had a client who had full blown AIDS, but was still going to the bath houses and having unprotected sex.

Frequently.

Joyfully.

Unrepentently.

When his support manager asked him if he told his partners that he had AIDS, his response was, "No. Why should I? If they don't ask, that's their problem, not mine. And if they don't want to use condoms, that's their problem, too."*

Now, no matter how reprehensible the rest of us thought the little bastard was, our job at that point was to support the support manager, and help him find a way to help his client without expressing his personal horror.

In one of the strangest strategy sessions I've ever sat through, we helped this support manager come up with a plan try and get the client to change his mind and his behavior without appearing to be judgemental. The tactic we cam up with was for the support manager to discuss with his client the fact that the client might well be hastening his own demise by becoming reinfected with any number of additional strains of the virus if he continued on this path.

Imagine, if you will, the mindset of having to appeal to the vanity and selfishness of such a person. But that was the likeliest way to achieve the desired behavior modification -- and hopefully to preventing him from passing the virus to anyone else.

Here's the hard part: the support manager could not ask him about his partners, nor could any of the rest of us. In order for the support manager program to work for everyone, confidentiality is paramount -- even in a case like this.

This is where I really understand what the Madman is saying. Sometimes you just want to run screaming into the night. Or grab someone by the shoulders and shake them until their teeth rattle. And you just can't.

For many, many people, that program was a lifeline to living with dignity and be recognized as human beings at a time when no one in the world wanted to acknowledge their existence, let alone their humanity.

We quickly learned that you do the best you can, and leave the rest to God or karma or whatever you want to call it. There's not always a satisfying answer.

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*This attitude was a significant anomaly, not the norm.
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