FOR BREAKING NEWS VISIT www.qns.com DECEMBER 17, 2015 • THE QUEENS COURIER 41 oped A LOOK BACK This 1952 picture shows the Gulf service station at the corner of Cooper Avenue and 70th Street in Glendale, at one time owned by a George Johnson. The station is long gone, having been replaced by a McDonald’s restaurant several decades ago. Drivers, however, continue to fi ll up their vehicles at the Mobil station located across the street at the corner of Myrtle and Cooper avenues. We want your historic photos of Queens! Email them to editorial@queenscourier.com, or mail them to The Queens Courier, 38-15 Bell Blvd., Bayside, NY 11361. All mailed pictures will be carefully returned to you! letters & comments MINIMUM WAGE INCREASE ISN’T A LIFE SAVER I am getting sick and tired of activists, columnists, politicians and others complaining that minimum wage jobs cannot support a family. I know this may sound cold but it is reality: minimum wage jobs never were intended to support a family. Minimum wage jobs have many purposes. Among them are to allow high school students to earn spending money; to allow college students to earn spending/tuition money; to introduce high school graduates to what it’s like to work; and, most of all, that this particular job is not what you want to do for the rest of your life, and should inspire them to learn a marketable skill. In addition, I just want to point out that recently I heard that NYC is looking for lifeguards who will be paid approximately $13.50 per hour, which is less than the $15 per hour that activists are “demanding” for fast food workers. No one is standing up for the wouldbe lifeguards (I am not a lifeguard myself, so this is not a self-serving letter). In order to become a lifeguard you must undergo a 40-hour training course, learn CPR, and demonstrate physical ability via a swim test. In addition, when you are working you are responsible for the lives of the swimmers at your location. Why would anyone choose to be a lifeguard with more responsibilities and less pay than a fast-food worker? Lifeguard training and work used to demonstrate to college and high school students that hard work does pay off, but now why bother when you don’t have to work hard? Thomas Murawski, Glendale GIVE NON-VIOLENT INTERVENTION A CHANCE Regarding Ed Horn’s understandably emotional pro-war letter in the Dec. 3 issue: Another endless war against a small group of Islamic extremists is certainly not an answer, and will serve as their recruiting tool. After 15 years of militaristic folly, we need to pursue rational peaceful solutions to enhance our security. It rests on the core principle: do no further harm. Terrorism will survive war; people don’t. Shortly after attacks in Paris and Beirut, President Obama defended his “war on terror,” in which Washington funnels millions worth of weapons to its proxies in Syria, and engages in an air war totally unauthorized by Congress, and said ISIS was contained. As the civilian death toll rises and the refugee crisis grows, the U.S. war on terror continues to fail, because you can’t bomb terrorism out of existence. As governments in Moscow, Paris and Beirut are learning, you put your own people’s lives on the line when you try. Instead of a cry for more war, the tragedy should be a moment to reexamine assumptions that have enmeshed us in a war that we cannot win, and should not continue. Military intervention has succeeded in horrifi c damage and killing people, but it’s done nothing to wind down the greatest factor fueling the rise of ISIS: Syria’s long, bloody civil war. An international arms embargo and a deal between the Assad regime and other rebel groups — diplomacy, not drones — would go much further toward curtailing the threat of ISIS. We certainly have the ability to dry up ISIS’ funding by not buying their cheap oil; and stop the pipeline of arms and funding from our “allies,” especially Saudi Arabia. Military intervention serves to incite further resistance, as we learned so well in Vietnam. In proposing to pour more fuel on the fi re, war hawks show an absence of imagination, which is typical of Western statesmanship when it comes to the Islamic world. Simply trying harder is not a basis of policy; it’s past time for the West to consider something different. Robert Keilbach, Flushing FOR MORE NEWS VISIT QNS.COM Recalling pol’s efforts to protect babies from AIDS BY ASSEMBLYMAN MICHAEL SIMANOWITZ On Tuesday, Dec. 1, World AIDS Day, Governor Andrew Cuomo received the World AIDS Day Leadership Award from the End AIDS NY 2020 Coalition. The governor’s work and demonstrated commitment to ending the AIDS epidemic in New York State is herculean. However, more than 20 years before Governor Cuomo stood in the Apollo Theater announcing New York’s accomplishments, a selfdescribed “Jewish grandmother from Queens” stalked the halls of the Capitol in an effort to bring common sense to the way New York was dealing with the raging epidemic. In 1993, my mentor and predecessor, Assemblywoman Nettie Mayersohn, read an article in Newsday about a woman whose husband had become so ill, he had to be hospitalized. When she entered her husband’s ward, she found the doctors and the staff wearing masks and gloves. The doctors evaded her questions and fi nally one nurse approached her and said “please get yourself tested for AIDS.” The article went on to point out that the nurse probably broke the law by even suggesting to the woman that her husband was infected with HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. The doctor and staff that refused to answer her questions were simply following the law at the time which prohibited notifying even the spouse of someone suffering from AIDS that their partner was infected. As it turned out, her husband was being treated for AIDS and eventually succumbed to it. Unfortunately, it also turned out that she herself was infected. After looking into the situation, Nettie introduced the Partner Notifi cation Bill, which would basically have treated HIV as any other sexually transmitted disease and require that if someone tested positive for HIV/AIDS, the Health Department had to notify their spouse or other known sexual partner that they may have been exposed to the virus and should themselves get tested. Knowing that the bill would have an easier time becoming law if she had organizational support, she reached out to groups that historically played a leading role on women’s issues. The response she got was both shocking and hugely disappointing. Nettie, who had been named the NOW (National Organization for Women) Legislator of the Year in 1989 for her support of choice, gay rights and every other liberal issue of concern to women and the gay community, found that all of these same groups were opposed to her bill. The powers that be, often referred to as “the AIDS industrial complex,” had determined that AIDS was to be treated differently than any other deadly communicable disease – the privacy of the infected individual would be more important than stopping the spread of the virus by that individual to others. It was then that she got her fi rst exposure to the organized coalition determined to protect what she coined “AIDS exceptionalism.” She then went to the New York State Medical Society for support and while they offered their support of her Partner Notifi cation legislation, their representatives told her something that made her put her life on hold. Every newborn in New York State was being tested for the HIV/AIDS virus anonymously as part of a program run by the Centers for Disease Control to track the epidemic. Public health offi cials knew somewhere in the neighborhood of 1,800 babies in New York were testing positive every year – but New York State law said you could not tell the mother that the baby had been exposed to the virus because that meant the mother herself was infected and that she had a right “not to know.” Even worse was the fact that so many of these HIVexposed infants were not actually infected but were simply carrying their mothers’ HIV antibodies. If their HIV-infected moms knew to avoid breast feeding, a known method of HIV transmission, their lives could be saved. Unfortunately, the powers that be simply didn’t care. Nettie then introduced legislation requiring all newborns in the state be tested for HIV and that their mothers be notifi ed of the results, thus allowing the babies and their mothers to receive necessary and, in the case of the infants, life-saving treatment. Despite support from almost every public health professional and organization in the state, even this simple proposal took years to gain legislative approval because of privacy and civil rights concerns. When the legislation fi nally went into effect in 1997, many warned that disaster would strike: mothers would refuse to go to the hospital to give birth, domestic violence would increase and discrimination against women with HIV would explode. None of those predictions materialized. As the governor’s announcement shows, in less than 20 years, we have eliminated mother-to-child transmission in New York State. Nettie didn’t stop there. After the Baby AIDS Bill passed in 1996, Nettie spent the next two years fi ghting for passage of her Partner Notifi cation bill, and then her bill to give rape victims access to the HIV status of their attacker. Then working with the very doctors treating HIV and AIDS, she challenged the regulations surrounding so-called “informed written consent” which again treated HIV differently than any other disease. Again, she won against all odds and fi nally brought some common sense to the treatment of this totally preventable disease. Nettie endured protests at her home and offi ce. But she never backed down. Nettie fought and fought and fought because she knew that her cause was just and that lives were at stake. I am hopeful that under the leadership of Governor Cuomo, New York will soon celebrate a year with no new infections at all and that Nettie will be recognized for the countless lives her tenacity was responsible for saving. Simanowitz represents the 27th Assembly District.
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