Where is the Health Inspector?

Fellow Noshers,

I usually like a corner table here. One that allows an unobstructed view of just what is going on. Some people are just people watchers, and I am one of those. Other nights, though, the most interesting seat is one near the window. Here, you still get a chance to see the circus inside; but often the best show is the one out on the street.

There are the folks who ate at the organic fod place down the street, or maybe those who do their own home cookin'. Doesn't matter. They share a common mission: improve diet and nutritional status, for everyone. They seem to believe the best strategy is to harass the Diners' patrons before they can enter. "Dont' go in there! That stuff is gonna kill you! How can you eat that crap? You people are sickos and perverts for liking that stuff! You should have seen the health inspector's report! He's gonna shut this place down someday, just you wait! And then how are you gonna like starving to death? You people are going to rot from the inside! The surgeon general warned you about places like this!"

What does it mean to have mercy on the Diners' victims? The voices offering solutions to the crisis divide mainly into two camps: those who view the diseases in purely physical terms to be handled with a purely physical approach, and those who understand the spiritual and moral dimension inherent in this pandemic.

Critics of the demonstrators, however, warn that even if they do care, these believers offer the wrong solutions—solutions that jeopardize health and alienate the needy in the process. Critics complain that the demonstrators show "too much morality" and "too little sense" in their fight. The critics, defenders of the Diner, claim that nutritional deficiencies and progressive food-related illnesses affect everybody.

But rather than answer the root causes of the disease, they are in denial of their sickness and insist that to advocate moral changes is to pass judgment. The disease is AIDS, and it usually strikes at fairly discrete groups such as homosexuals, prostitutes, drug addicts. It is no respecter of morals, and will affect the general population, including the innocent.

It is exactly for this reason the demonstrators should discourage risky behavior (unfaithfulness, promiscuity, drug use) that brings it into the rest of society. That is not finger-pointing or judging; that is true compassion. This includes discouraging dehumanizing situations, including prostitution and sex trafficking.

The critics will say that such attitudes will leave the drug addicts, homosexuals and prostitutes in the cold. The real test for the demonstrators' beliefs will be to bring those in to a warmer place. Those who disagree with promoting abstinence and fidelity in the AIDS fight seem to believe proponents are just moralizing—standing in judgment of victims. But Christians realize that AIDS requires more than physical answers. Most of the situations that lead to the contraction of HIV are not merely physical: They begin with a decision (with the exceptions, of course, of rape victims, vulnerable children, etc.).

The AIDS crisis is about evil—"the sanctity of life” (people devalue their own lives and resign themselves to contracting AIDS); “disproportionate suffering” (one bad decision could lead to unimaginable suffering); “and a dozen other things—trust, fear, weakness, traditions, temptation”: intangible realities that cannot be quantified, nor treated with physical solutions.

Those who eschew any moral dimension to AIDS prevention seem to believe humans are good already and don’t need to change—that AIDS is something completely disconnected from human nature that needs only to be wiped away with condoms and drugs.

But this denies truth. Life is not the way it's supposed to be. This is more evidence of the Fall. And because of the Fall, we are not any "good". If we were any good, then what would happen if there were enough clean needles and condoms?

Without internal change, would we still have predatory men, prostitution, drug users in slavery to mind-numbing chemicals? With enough condoms and clean needles, would you be able to say your job is done, their lives are whole?

Every franchise of the Diner needs a good soup kitchen next door.

~Bill