Philadelphia Community Access Coalition
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MR. MEANS: My name is Donny Means. I've been HIV-positive for 13 years. I've traveled between four countries, eight I've lived in. I've been on the Internet now for approximately four years, and I also suffered from bipolar depression. And in the world of "Friends" and "Malcolm in the House" and all the atypical, illogical ideas of TV, there would be no place for me on regular network TV. I am an artist, I am an HIV AIDS activists. Some of my constituents are children. Some of my constituents senior citizens. So in one way or another, I represent everybody here.

Now, I would like to start out with my impression of Philadelphia. Upon arriving from the Airport, all you see is just mangled up pieces of metal, but it's still my home. I see faded pieces of memories, abandoned homes, but it's still my home. People around the world ask me, how's the el, does it still smell like a toilet bowl? But it's still my home.

But the last thing that really bothers me is, around the country people say, we have a place where we can speak, we have a place where we can talk about our problems, do you? And for that reason, it hurts me greatly.

And I'll take a poem and I'll explain it to you. Two poems very quickly.

One is called "The El."

"On the Market-Frankford El, it's like a trip to Great Adventure. It's always an adventure and always is ever far away from anything great.

"Sometimes when the cars get crowded, I feel as if the whole platform is swinging and swaying. I can't wait to get to my destination, feeling my whole body quiver and quake, my heart begins to palpitate. All I can think is, Lord, take me home safely. It's the only thing which I can concentrate.

"Oh, boy, what a City Hall smell."

Now, about this issue of public access television, one day, I was sitting in the mental hospital, because after my nephew was murdered and after a friend of mine died San Francisco 12 hours after he died, I don't want to kill you all with melodrama, I came up with these little thoughts 'cause I wanted to try to get some health insurance because, first of all, I had to worry about my health, the physical one, and then the mental health.

This one, I think typifies, our situation here. We have a case of "Dollars and Senselessness."

"We live in an age of so much litigation, of the indignated, antagonistic, egalitarian, retaliatory sort. A day when conditions like those that are life-threatening are negotiated by insurance providers who have enabled themselves by legal means to their virtue with blessed assurance of the legal community of a conflict.

"Are we the lucky litigants, a hostile takeover? Did someone say penniless pensioners? Did someone say they felt a prisoner, making the legal rights nullifiable for the poor and the people of color?

"Out of the blue blood, Main Line, under the false allegiance, he's doing fine sort of kind? Right, so very respectful, so very wealthy, and still so very exclusively white. So very proper, so very well-bred, so financially-powerful, the exclusive white financial hand, all right? Financial discrimination. Now do you see the light?

"In an age where the technology to heel is no longer issues of the imagination, yet they weren't being used to save your child, my mother, your father, as they'd rather say to a lifesaving procedure, nay.

"It must be negated due to the actuarial and cost-cutting, cost-effective policies with such concepts like a human compassion clause to be relegated as part of proper protocol or procedure.

"Dollars and senselessness infects you all of us, from the college age through maxing out on a $10,000 line of credit to upgrade the same model car, wondering if its decision-making was logically pure. Living in denial and confusion, he begins to ponder, Is there something wrong with me, is there a cure? Will my insurance cover it? Oh, my God, how much will I have to pay?

"Dollars and senselessness kills most insidiously, using financial means to obscure for sure with legal language to confuse those traveling down the hostile insurance-regulated waters to the shores of recuperation in a dinghy with neither rudder nor oar.

"In a system designed to be impersonal, that seems to give the impression that to remit compensation is really the most inconvenient of chores. For it is this type of mindset in the allegedly civilized world of capitalistic dollars and senselessness that I do most abhor. Selling my principles myself, like a loathsome money-grubbing little whore.

"All I want to do is survive, all these people want to do is just survive. All we want to do is understand what life is really worth."

Thank you very much.

(Applause.)

COUNCILMAN COHEN: George, you're the final witness. You still have to identify yourself for the record.

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