Yesterday evening, I attended the gala awards dinner for the New York AIDS Film Festival. As impressed as I was by the lineup of films and directors, I was impressed (or, rather, caught off guard) even more by several simple statistics presented.

With the efficacy of exceedingly expensive drug cocktails, the issue of AIDS, at least in my own sheltered world, had been remarkably out of sight and out of mind. So I couldn’t have told you that, already, over 25 million people have died from AIDS. That AIDS has left more than 15 million children orphaned. That some 40 million people are currently HIV positive. Or that, by 2010, 60 million more are expected to contract HIV.

Sixty million more. At some point during dinner, it occurred to me that number is more than ten times those killed in the Holocaust. At that point, I suddenly felt horribly ashamed of myself. At some level, I had always believed that, had I been alive at the time, I would have actively worked against the Holocaust. Had I been living in America at the time, I would have pushed our country, and the rest of the world, towards facing such a clear problem, even if it was easier to ignore it completely until it was much too late.

Yet, here I was, hiding from a problem literally ten times the magnitude. What exactly had I done about it? What exactly will I do about it now?

“It is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy or a fascist dictatorship or a parliament or a communist dictatorship … That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country.”
-Nazi Reichsmarshall Hermann Goering

One of my favorite things about the internet: whatever the assertion, someone has already gone through the trouble of fact-checking it obsessively, then posted the results. Point in case, an interesting look at the much-discussed Universal Democracy Peace Formula (essentially, the claim that no two democratic countries have every waged war on each other). From the conclusion, by far the most interesting part:

“Although there is no undisputed case of two democracies at war, the evidence certainly casts doubt on the thesis. In fact, the thesis is not nearly as strong as the statement that no two countries with a MacDonald’s Restaurant have ever gone to war with one another, so why do you never hear distinguished international diplomats expound on the need to sell more beef patties in the world?

At first, this MacDonald’s factoid seems enormously trivial; however, when you stop and think about it, the MacDonald’s Peace Formula can be quite interesting. It seems to indicate that as countries are incorporated into the global economy by trans-national corporations, they stop waging war on one another (although it might be vice versa). Unfortunately, no one wants to go around saying that the best way to assure peace is to surrender your national economy to large heartless corporations. It makes a much better campaign slogan to say that democracy is the best path to peace. This is why we see so many people claiming that democracies never fight each other, and relatively few people outside of MacDonald’s Corporate Headquarters claiming the geopolitical virtues of burger bars. “

In other words: Want peace? Skip the protest and grab a Value Meal. Ah, the delicious, high-cholesterol irony.