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?