Victoria Noe

For musical theater fans, that question evokes a song sung by John Adams in 1776. For those who are activists, it’s a lament. 

Last week I was privileged to take a two-day workshop, “Write to Change the World”. Offered by The Op Ed Project, it proved to be an intense and productive lesson in how to write effective opinion essays. Their focus is underrepresented voices.

We worked as a group of about 40 people, mostly women. Almost everyone was younger than I am, which was great. I’ve had many discussions in the past two weeks about how to reach various demographics. Those discussions focused on politics and elections, but the concerns apply to many issues. The vehicles of communication have changed wildly in the past few years, and continue to change. Some people naturally gravitate towards one or the other, so we wind up often preaching to the choir. How do we break out of that bubble and find people who are not the same as us?

It’s not just a matter of figuring out how they prefer to receive the news. Once you find them, you have to find a way to make them care about things that are important to you.

That was brought home to me in a rather dramatic way on the second day of that workshop. I was putting together an op-ed about HIV in the US. Many people believe AIDS is ‘over’, in large part because it’s not a priority in the general population. We were tasked to put forward the strongest statistic we want to use to make a point. Mine was “49% of all new HIV diagnoses come from 9 states in the South”. It’s a startling statistic, isn’t it? 

My partner in the exercise was first tasked with being encouraging, drawing out, for example, the reasons behind that statistic. But then, she was asked to argue with me. What she said stopped me in my tracks:

“Why should the other 41 states care?”

I was speechless, not a common state for me. She had absolutely nailed what I needed to say in my op-ed (which I’m still working on). 

Working in the HIV community has always had its challenges, has always had its ‘beating your head against the wall’ moments. One challenge has changed very little since 1981: how do we convince people outside the community of the urgency and importance of our work?

Now I know I have to find the ‘why’. 

And that task is something I think a lot of us - no matter the cause we support - will be focused on for the foreseeable future.