So, anyway, when I was much much younger and first heard about AIDS, and heard it described as 'the gay plague', I thought that was fitting and apt. That people got what they deserved and perhaps it would weed out the population some. (I'm not sure whether that part was an anti-gay or an anti-people thought; I've always been sociopathic, but I'm not sure whether I ever hated gay people.)Now there's a thought. AIDS was something gay people deserved to get. Nevermind that, at the time, I'd already done sexual things with my best friend who also happened to be female. Or that I was reading, and had no problems with, stories with characters who liked people of their own genders. I'm pretty sure that, at the time, 'gay people' in the real world meant, to me, something out of very bad porn with unprotected sex and gloryholes and leather bars and so forth. Now, I'm not so sure how much of that even exists, but anyway, I still sort of buy the bit that, if you get AIDS from unprotected sex, you deserve it. And then I want to slap myself for thinking that, because, hello, open-mindedness here. However, slapping myself doesn't change that I really believe that.
Yeah, somewhere inside, I probably do believe that having unprotected sex and getting pregnant is what you deserve. Or getting a social disease. If you behave stupidly, you deserve the consequences. The only part I suppose I'm slapping myself about is the part where I sound like a homophobic bigot.
Which kinda explains what I was thinking then. But now, I don't really think like that anymore. And it's not because I've abandoned the 'natural consequences for one's actions' line of reasoning so much as that "The Princess Bride" is starting to sound, well, more grown-up all the time. Because, at the end of the book, the heroes don't get away happily. Things go badly. The horse throws a shoe. The villains start catching up. And the book tells you it's because life isn't fair. When I first read that, when I was quite young and still believed in the things I started talking about at the beginning of this entry, I thought the ending of the book was very sad and didn't like it very much. I like it a lot now. Because it's right and true, even if it is sad.
We often get what we deserve, but now that I'm older, I kinda hope that we all get something better than that.
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