It’s a slow and insidious disease. There is no cure, only expensive palliative care. It takes you away from yourself bit by bit. Death may take years. Your mind doesn’t work the way it used to. Your family has to watch you shrink from the healthy, robust person you once were into a mere shell of yourself. People don’t know how to act around you, and you don’t fully understand what’s happening.
I’m not talking about Alzheimer’s, though. I’m talking about AIDS, a disease that grew and grew and grew in the 1980s, while Reagan was president, refusing to address it publicly until 1987. He did nothing to advocate for adequate funding to research its causes or its cure.
Do you feel compassion because of what Ronald Reagan and his family went through in his last decade even though you disagree with the way he lived his life? If you do, then you’re a better person than he was.
