Not a cheery message for the class of 2009. Here, three Northwestern seniors reflect on the economic downturn and the new administration. The big question: will we all be living in a box come June?

No, it wasn’t a new puppy, or even a new pony (Does nobody read my Christmas wish list?). It was a simple white tank-top with an American flag etched across the front.

Something about the way I paused and furrowed my brow must have given away my confusion. My family is not exactly the flag-wearing type. It’s more of the flag-burning variety.

My aunt noticed my distress and cleared her throat. “We’re taking the flag back,” she announced to the room. Various family members looked up from the wrapping paper carnage. There was an awkward pause, and then — “It’s about time!”

My family is still getting used to the idea of patriotism. Barack Obama, you know, has given a lot of people Old Glory fever. Even my 91-year-old grandparents, who’ve lived through nearly a century of America’s ups and downs, are enthused. But their newly minted pride raises a question currently being debated in living rooms across America: Is Old Glory cool again? Is the star-spangled banner perhaps even … fashionable?

Photo by drp on Flickr, licensed under Creative Commons.

It’s a question loaded down with the collective weight of what our national symbol represents. Yes, Obama is young, inspirational and has a great “American” story, whatever that means. But is one election enough to wipe out all of the things that have dominated our family dinners for the past eight years — the Iraq War, Guantanamo, Hurricane Katrina — and turn my relatives into hardcore flag-wavers?

My family isn’t the only one grappling with such a dilemma. The liberals of this country collectively snickered at the lapel-pin scandal that broke early in the election. And the amount of red, white and blue that has been used to make a mountain of poor political decisions palatable during the Bush administration is enough to make us feel slightly ill.

I grew up in a part of this country (read: a West Coast, godless city) where the American flag was considered a bit, well, déclassé. It was okay to maybe hang one up somewhere — if it were upside-down, that is. It certainly wasn’t acceptable to stick a large “These colors don’t run!” bumper-sticker on the back of your car, and actually wearing the flag was really grotesque. Unless, of course, you were doing it ironically.

Please understand: I don’t hate this country. In fact, I really do appreciate the ability to publish criticism of the government without risking imprisonment or death. It’s just that I came of age in an era when being an American just a little bit embarrassing. And there was more to it than having a president who thought that “misunderestimate” was a word.

And so, as a result, there is no American flag the size of a tablecloth hanging from the wall in my bedroom. But there is an Italian flag, and an Argentine flag and, come to think of it, a pair of earrings with the South African flag on them. But what political statement am I trying to make? That I wish I were Italian? (Okay, so maybe I do. Think about the pizza, guys.)

Blame it on a college education rife with left-wing propaganda, but sometimes it’s hard to stand behind the history of this country (not that the histories of South Africa, Argentina or Italy are such shining examples, either). The flag has been used to cloak some of our biggest mistakes, from the Spanish-American War to the present-day Patriot Act. And the fact that we fly our colors the highest when we’re scared (about wars, a floundering economy or both) is also a bit off-putting. So call me jaded if you want — and I’m sure that some of you will call me much worse — but this recent wave of patriotism is making me nervous.

Let’s not forget the fact that Obama hasn’t actually done anything yet. That’s a given. But let us also not ignore that all that flag waving is for a man who is the exception to the rule, for an individual who overcame all of the seemingly insurmountable obstacles that this country put in front of him. Americans think they deserve a pat on the back for electing a black man president? Please. We should be asking ourselves what took so long, or acknowledging the fact that his race is only significant in light of our nation’s disturbing history.

November 4th was heady stuff, I know. The rest of the world loves us again. We’ve got change we can believe in. And gosh darn it, this really is the land of opportunity. Go team!

I think I’d find that sentiment more inspiring if I weren’t about to graduate into a job market as barren as the surface of Mars. How’s this instead: If Obama somehow manages to turn the economy around, resolve the Iraq War gracefully, institute real educational reform and do something productive about health care, I’ll actually get excited. Those are some stars and stripes I can really get behind. But until then, the tank top is staying in the back of the closet.

When Barack Obama was named the next president by a JumboTron-size Wolf Blitzer, the crowd at Grant Park positively thundered with celebration. That was to be expected. What I didn’t expect was that half of the hard-nosed journalists around me would also simultaneously burst into tears of joy.

In the days leading up to the election, I practiced my poker face religiously. I’d miraculously gotten press passes when the news station I’d interned at in South Africa for my journalism residency announced it was coming to the U.S. to cover the election. Excited as I was, I dreaded letting a hint of emotion shine through on Election Day — I’d be denounced by the more-weathered reporters, ejected from the press box as a fraud.

I shouldn’t have worried.

All forms of bias showed through on Tuesday night. Journalists whooped and hollered when Obama won Pennsylvania. They wore “Change” pins on their jackets. They took pictures of Obama’s acceptance speech with their phones like preteen girls at a Hannah Montana concert.

Whatever emotion I was afraid of showing was replaced by something unexpected: utter bewilderment.

If there’s anything that I’ve learned in three and a half years of Medill classes, it’s that unbiased reporting is next to godliness. Journalism professors intone time and time again that personal opinion needs to be sacrificed for something called “truth.” When I was a freshmen, this sounded like a small price to pay.

Now in the middle of my senior year, this presidential campaign has made me realize what I’ve actually signed up for. I can’t wear candidate buttons. I can’t make campaign donations. I can’t even put a damn sign in my window.

It’s been a painful reeducation process: Journalism ideals demand that I switch off the part of myself that harbors a personal opinion. In a Medillian utopia, I can’t prefer peanut butter to jelly, let alone Obama to McCain.

It didn’t become apparent how difficult this would be until I tried to apply classroom theory to the real world. My first taste of real unbiased reporting came during a stint at a major news company in Washington D.C. this past summer. My first week on the job, I was sent to a political rally for Michelle Obama at an upscale hotel. When she walked onto the stage, the room erupted with applause. I lifted my hands to clap (it’s what everyone in the room was doing!) when I noticed all the reporters in the press box giving me dirty looks.

I had to sit on my hands for the rest of the event. It made taking notes difficult.

It took months of practice, but I eventually learned to talk politics without saying the word “I.” Not surprisingly, my incredibly political relatives gave up talking to me at family dinners. I had become a dispassionate robot that only spewed facts and numbers. My mother wondered aloud if I’d secretly switched political affiliations while at college.

I felt increasingly conflicted leading up to November 4th. The day before Election Day, I had a minor crisis of conviction, one of those “What am I doing with my life?” moments. I’m not sure what brought it on. Maybe it was all the Obama shirts on campus. On the verge of a meltdown, I burst into my roommate’s room.

“Am I doing enough for democracy?!” I shouted.

My roommate was fresh from canvassing all weekend in Ohio, three Obama stickers pressed to her vest. She looked at me like I was an idiot.

“Free press is incredibly important for democracy,” she said without hesitation.

And with that sentiment in my back pocket, I headed down to Grant Park.

It stuck with me until Pennsylvania went blue. That’s when I first heard sounds in the press section. Sounds of happiness. Forbidden sounds.

With battleground states quickly falling to Obama, the jubilant feeling from the crowd was infectious, and many of my fellow reporters seemed to have caught the bug. They pumped their fists in the air. They shouted. They cried. I was so surprised I could only gape.

But the surprise quickly dissolved into relief. Watching the blubbering reporters around me, I realized that journalists aren’t robots concerned only with the truth. They’re human too, and try as they might, they can’t just switch off the opinion part of their brain. The press corral on Tuesday night was definitely Obamaland, and when he won, the journalists wanted to celebrate, too.

Which isn’t to say that I approve of the reporters’ victory dance. Yes, what we learn in the classroom obviously gets bent in the newsroom. But the credibility of all journalists relies on the illusion that we’re impartial. “No bias” is just a smoke screen journalists hide behind to gain authority for the facts they report. When journalists let their masks slip, they’re not doing their jobs. And when they’re not doing their jobs, people don’t know who to trust.

I’m disappointed that some reporters at Grant Park couldn’t constrain themselves until they got home. But then again, I waited until the safe confines of my apartment before letting my emotions loose. And you know what? It was kind of lonely.

Earlier this year, the owner of the Philly Cheese Steak on 23rd was shot and killed inside his restaurant. The front door is boarded up now, but you can still look through the dirty windows and see overturned chairs and broken glass.

The Central District doesn’t look like this anymore. The rest of the area is hard, shiny buildings and industrial apartments. But this tiny sandwich shop still looks the same, a memorial to a place that no longer exists.

My friend Albert blames “a bunch of hipsters” who he claims have stormed the area with their “tight pants and big sunglasses.” In light of his vehemence, I neglect to point out that I, too, own a pair of unnecessarily large sunglasses.

As I pass a recently sprouted Safeway—filled with yuppies, no doubt—I grind my teeth and try to look on the bright side. I loved the old Central District, but it had its problems. For starters, the area was rife with gang violence. And drugs.

My sophomore year, two men were shot in their car across the street from my high school, presumably the result of a drug turf struggle. Kids from the school newspaper took pictures of the car and the yellow “do not cross” tape.

So the CD had its problems—what neighborhood doesn’t? But it also had an eclectic community that made even me—a white girl from the northern tip of the neighborhood—feel at home. In my teens I hung out in Ethiopian restaurants and slam clubs and a small convenience store on Union Street that never carded minors. I attended the same battered high school where a young Jimi Hendrix once taught himself to play the guitar.

I call up my high school security guard Michael Dixon and ask if we can meet for coffee. Dixon grew up in the Central District in the 60s, when race riots at school were commonplace and he and his brothers were top members of the Seattle Black Panther Party. He wants to meet at Starbucks.

Dixon has graying dreadlocks that fall halfway down his back and is carrying a book about the JFK assassination when he arrives. He’s also drinking out of a Venti paper cup. When I ask him about what’s happening to the neighborhood, he snorts derisively.

“They’ve destroyed it,” he says. I don’t feel the need to ask who “they” are. “It was full of black families. What they’ve done to us since they spread that crack…Some of those families can’t afford to live in the CD.” Drugs and the people who sell and buy them have been in the Central District as long as I’ve been alive.

“This isn’t something that just happened.” Dixon leans forward, his eyes hard. “This is business.”
Struck by his ominous tone, I go digging on the Internet, looking for proof of a conspiracy to destroy my beloved neighborhood. What I find is a blog community of new Central District residents—apparently all white 30-somethings with kids.

I begin to read, first with skepticism and then with repulsed fascination. One blogger asks for shopping recommendations in his newly “developed” block and someone suggests a convenience store with “no fortified beverages, Funyuns or smoking materials allowed.” Others want a café that will serve Turkish coffee and paninis. These are all fine ideas, another blogger points out, except for the fact that “it would be an operational challenge for the owner to keep the street dealers and other troublemakers out.”

I scroll through the rest of the blog secretly praying that the anti-Funyun person gets his front door graffittied. And then I see a post dated May 1: “Man shot in the neck at 23rd and Jackson.” I scroll down further and there’s a similar post on May 13 about shots fired at 15th and Alder, another shooting on May 26 and an assault on June 1.

Well, some things never change.

It’s game day for Sarah Palin. The Republican Vice Presidential candidate has been vigorously preparing for weeks for the big debate with Senator Joe Biden tonight, brushing up on policy and the names of various foreign leaders. But Palin’s biggest accessory tonight may not be her ability to say Ahmadinejad’s name without choking. It might not even be her lipstick. Her best weapon is the one she already has on the tip of her tongue: her accent.

Palin’s particular pronunciation is as defining as John F. Kennedy’s thick Boston brogue and President Bush’s Southern drawl. It’s been lampooned by Tina Fey on Saturday Night Live and described as “Fargo-esque” by the Washington Post. It’s been called “awful,” “nauseating,” and “dumb.” So how could it possibly give her an edge in the debate?

According to Kathryn Campbell-Kibler, an Assistant Professor of linguistics at Ohio State University, Palin speaks with what is typically referred to as a “North Central American English” accent, which is spoken in Minnesota, Wisconsin, northern Iowa, upper Michigan, and North and South Dakota. A quick look at CNN’s electoral map reveals why that’s important: Swing states like Minnesota, Iowa, and Michigan are all currently leaning Obama, with Wisconsin a tossup. Just by virtue of talking at the debate tonight, Palin could appeal voters in those states and put the Midwest back into play.

“Some people enjoy the small town accent,” said Communication senior James D’Angelo, President of Northwestern’s College Republicans, adding that it makes Palin sound “friendly and familiar and just kind of relaxed.”

Campbell-Kibler agreed that a Palin’s accent could influence some voters. “In Fargo and also Prarie Home Companion, there’s a portrayal of people from that region as being very nice or hospitable,” she said.

Before anybody gets insulted that something so trivial as an accent could sway an election, remember that voters often choose candidates they can relate to (see: Obama and black voters, Clinton and women). And Presidential candidates sometimes pick their VPs for the express reason of winning specific states or regions of the U.S. — in the 1960 election JFK picked the Texan Lyndon Johnson to help carry the South, while Richard Nixon chose Henry Cabot Lodge to match Kennedy’s pull in New England.

The only problem is Palin isn’t from the Midwest. She’s from Alaska. So just where did that gosh darn accent come from?

A little Scandinavian, a little Alaskan English

A quick look into Palin’s background doesn’t make the origin of her accent any clearer. She was born in Sandpoint, Idaho but moved as an infant to Wasilla, Alaska, where she grew up. Her college years involved a lot of moving around: She attended school in Hawaii, Idaho and Alaska before graduating. She then moved to Anchorage to work as a sports broadcaster before returning to Wasilla, where she began her political career. Nowhere in her personal history is there any mention of the Midwest.

Some people have suggested that she picked the accent up from her parents. Again, no definitive dice: it appears that her father was born in Los Angeles and her mother is from Washington State. Others point to her college years in Idaho as a linguistic influence. This seems plausible — it’s the only part of the continental U.S. she spent any significant time. But does her accent sound at all Idahoan?

“Honestly, no,” said Megan Crepeau, a Medill junior who hails from Idaho Falls, Idaho. “I think it’d be more Midwestern than Idahoan.”

Most Northwestern students probably couldn’t identify an Alaskan accent any more than they could find South Ossetia on a map. According to the Registrar’s Office, only 20 of Northwestern’s 8,434 undergraduates are from Alaska. But with the fourth-smallest population of all the states, and the entire country of Canada as buffer, it’s pretty safe to say that Alaskan accents remain a mystery to most Americans.

There have been some attempts to solve the puzzle. The Swamp claimed Palin’s accent is the result of German and Scandinavian settlers in Alaska. Slate built on that theory, pointing to a specific settlement of Minnesotans near Wasilla, and adding that her accent also shows signs of something called “Alaskan English.”

“They have a slightly different accent in Wasilla than we do in Anchorage,” agreed Daniel Breen, 19, a student at the University of Alaska Anchorage. “A little Midwestern, but not as pronounced as Palin’s. People are going to think that that’s what Alaskans speak like, which isn’t true.”

So perhaps Palin’s accent has some upper-Midwestern roots, transplanted and mixed in with some local twang. Or maybe she’s been listening to Garrison Keillor too often (doubtful). The question remains: Will her accent make a difference in the race for the White House?

Less formal, more comfortable

President George Bush’s Southern accent has become one of his defining characteristics, along with his smirk and over-sized ears. During the campaigns 2000 and 2004 he was seen as a down-to-earth guy, the everyman.

“A lot of people don’t like the idea of electing an elistist,” said D’Angelo. “It was very effective for Bush. He was a person that people could sit down and have a beer with.”

Professor Campbell-Kibler said her research indicated that Palin’s use of dropped “g’s” (as in: “workin’”) might make her appear “less formal, more comfortable” to voters. Weinberg senior Will Upton, the Vice President of the Northwestern College Republicans, agreed that Palin’s accent made her more accessible as a politician.

“Her word choice and her more folksy attitude is much more appealing towards voters than Obama or McCain or Biden, who speak this Washington dialect,” he said. “I think she’s a departure from that and I think people see that as being kind of a good thing.”

There’s been talk that the John McCain campaign has been limiting Palin’s exposure, keeping the press at bay and carefully orchestrating her public appearances. Both D’Angelo and Upton agreed that during tonight’s debate Palin should try to be as genuine as possible and not conform to pressure from the McCain campaign.

“If she plays down the accent to make herself sound more intelligent that could be really detrimental to her,” said Upton. “People will see her as betraying her background and trying to be a politician.”

But Campbell-Kibler cautioned against putting too much stock in Palin’s pronunciation, explaining that her research showed people to be “heavily influenced by the whole package.” Accent impacted perception, but content mattered too.

Translation: Palin’s accent might have an effect, but it won’t win the election. She’ll need to back it up tonight with cohesive answers and some pit-bull aggression if she wants to come out on top.

Full disclosure: The video’s creators are both former residents of East Fairchild.

Sound familiar? No, I’m not talking about George W. here. He’s still our standing president. Or sitting president. Or sitting duck president. Take your pick.

South Africa’s ex-president, Thabo Mbeki. Photo by Russavia on Flickr, licensed under Creative Commons.

The person I’m actually describing is Thabo Mbeki, the now ex-president of South Africa. After serving for nine years and nearly two full terms, he was given the pink slip by his own party last weekend. Part of the reason involved political rivalry, but he also sucked at being president.

In that respect, Mbeki and Bush have a lot in common.

Let’s take a look, shall we? Mbeki denied that HIV causes AIDS; Bush denied that humans cause global warming. Mbeki got international hisses and jeers for supporting Zimbabwean dictator Robert Mugabe; Bush got the same response for invading Iraq. Mbeki never said anything; Bush never said anything intelligent.

So why aren’t we firing Bush? I know, I know, he’s only got a couple of months left – but so did Mbeki. And getting rid of your head of state also seems to be the popular thing to do right now – top leaders from Pakistan, Japan, Thailand, and Israel have been recently squeezed out by their respective governments. All the cool kids are doing it – why can’t we?

Because we love freedom. Wait. No, that isn’t right. Because we love stability. As much as my liberal friends (and family, and neighbors, and pets) have been advocating exiling Bush to French Guinea for the past eight years, it just isn’t a politically smart idea. As we’ve learned from other countries, people don’t like sudden change. Coups lead to backstabbing which leads to some military bigwig being instituted as dictator-for-life.

Alternatively, we have a nice, predictable system for exchange of power in this country that doesn’t cause too much indigestion. Sure, there have been some bumps along the way, (Nixon, anyone?) but for the most part, our system works pretty well. In this country we vote (even if all the votes don’t get counted) for a presidential candidate of our choosing (even if we only have two choices) and then we have to live with the outcome for four years. No, it’s not perfect, but it’s better than duking it out with spears and other cutlery like we did in the olden times.

The rest of the world sees Americans as impatient, foot-stomping brats. We like fast food, having hundreds of cable channels and high-speed internet. We get cranky when anything takes too long or doesn’t go our way. This is probably why a foreigner once asked me why the Democrats didn’t stage a coup in 2000 after a questionable election; I told her that perhaps our 219-year old political system had something to do with it. We might be the ADD nation, but at least our Constitution is relatively Ritalin-free.

Admit it Americans, you like stability. You enjoy the fact that there’s no famine and that you don’t have to defend your family with an AK-47. Which isn’t to say that things are rosy or that they couldn’t improve, but the fluctuations in an established government change from good (the Clinton years) to bad (the current economic downturn) instead of from devastating to catastrophic (see Exhibit A: Somalia).

In a few short months we’ll have a new president, minus a bloody coup. And because we live in ‘Merica, we know exactly when that will be: January 20th. Of course, no matter who takes office that day, there will be a lot of bitching and moaning. People will either be moving en masse to Canada or going on big, violent hunting trips. But there will be no revolutions. No government overthrows. It’s kind of nice to wake up and know who your president is every morning. That’s a privilege South Africans don’t have.

The author is currently on an internship in Johannesburg, South Africa, as part of Medill’s Journalism Residency program.

Johannesburg, South Africa — In the United States, MTV still pays lip service to HIV prevention. But for most of MTV’s target audience, HIV/AIDS awareness has all but fallen off the radar. At Northwestern University, students are more likely to have lost a friend to drunk driving than to AIDS.

Compare that same age group to their peers in South Africa, where 45 percent of youth aged 15 to 24 know someone who has died of AIDS.

The disease has ravaged South Africa — by some estimates, it causes half of all deaths in the country — and the nation now has one of the highest HIV rates in the world: nearly one in five adults have the virus. By proportion, that’d be as if every adult in the states of California and New York was infected.

As the most severe case of a global epidemic, South Africa is a medical battleground that has resisted efforts from the world’s wealthiest nations and brightest researchers. Through federal aid and private grants, America has poured billions into the country and the rest of sub-Saharan Africa.

Treatment and prevention programs across the continent receive aid through the Bush administration’s President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), a $15-billion, five-year plan that has garnered widespread praise for its commitment to stopping HIV/AIDS. Congress this month argues about whether to expend an additional $50 billion to fight the sexually transmitted disease, reviving a cultural debate that pits pro-abstinence conservatives against liberals who argue for more condoms and better sex education.

But what’s alarming is that no matter what Americans choose, the programs they pay for haven’t made much of a difference. Researchers point to studies that suggest Americans’ cultural blinders keep us from accepting how the sexually transmitted virus spreads and realistic ways it can be stopped. As a result, they argue, ineffective organizations end up getting massive support.

And so the lives of tens of millions may hinge on whether Americans can shed their preconceptions about sex — and focus their energies on proven solutions to the HIV/AIDS crisis.

The American HIV/AIDS rate peaked at around one percent in 1995. It hit certain demographics hard: gay men and intravenous drug users. In South Africa, which has the highest HIV rate in the world, about 18 percent of adults aged 15 to 49 are infected, most of them heterosexual, non-drug users.

To the average American, the differences seem easy to explain. South Africans don’t have enough access to condoms. They don’t understand how HIV is transmitted, or they believe in urban legends – that sex with a virgin cures HIV, for example.

“There’s a great presumption that Africans are ignorant. It’s not correct,” says Adam Ashforth, a Northwestern University professor of African Studies who spent several years in the 1990s researching in Soweto, a township in Johannesburg. “Basic knowledge about HIV has been extremely widespread. Ordinary people have known the correct answer [to] ‘How do you [get] AIDS?’ for a long time.”

Population surveys back up Ashforth: The majority of South Africans knows how HIV spreads and can be prevented. Sexual education can be improved, but it isn’t the problem.

In the late 1980s, researchers had another theory: Africans had more casual sex. To many Americans, this idea made sense — HIV is sexually transmitted, and because rates of infection were higher in sub-Saharan Africa than anywhere else in the world, Africans must have more sex with more partners.

But to Africans, this theory smacked of racism. The current president of South Africa, Thabo Mbeki, was especially furious about the assumption that Africans were sex-crazed. In a 2001 speech to South African university students, Mbeki angrily rejected the idea that Africans were “natural-born, promiscuous carriers of germs” and the notion that the continent was “doomed to an inevitable mortal end because of our unconquerable devotion to the sin of lust.”

Mbeki’s disgust may have influenced his current views on HIV/AIDS. The University of Sussex graduate and economist has since become famous for questioning the connection between HIV and AIDS. He has drawn international criticism for suggesting that AIDS-related diseases are caused by poverty and nutritional factors.

Mbeki has also dismissed antiretroviral drugs, which can add years to the life of an HIV-infected person, as a conspiracy to feed toxic poison to Africans. He has been accused of delaying the roll out of such medicine, and has appointed a Minister of Health who encourages HIV-positive people to eat beetroot and garlic as treatment.

Mbeki is right on one thing, however: Africans don’t contract HIV at a rapid rate because of uncontrollable sexual appetites. In fact, South Africans have about the same average number of sexual partners in their lifetimes as Americans. People in both countries also have sex for the first time at about the same age.

“There is an assumption that Africans are promiscuous,” says Dr. Edward Green, a senior researcher at Harvard University’s Center for Population and Development Studies who investigates the HIV/AIDS pandemic in sub-Saharan Africa. “That is at odds with our best behavioral surveys. Mbeki doesn’t like the reinforcement of the oversexed African, and I agree with him on that.”

A young man with dreadlocks plays a trumpet alone in a room. A sound outside disrupts his practicing and when he goes to look, he finds a large, colorful parade in the street. He joins the festivities, playing his trumpet as he marches. The music swells as the slogan, written in youthful text-speak, flashes across the screen: “The loveLife generation — will U b part of it?”

This is one of the recent broadcasting campaigns of loveLife, a South African HIV/AIDS prevention program. LoveLife began in 1999 and is backed by millions of dollars from U.S. foundations as well as the South African government. Aimed at teens aged 12 to 17, it’s one of the largest media efforts targeting HIV prevention in youth, and one of the most controversial.

Critics claim the program aims to please American sensibilities. Supporters argue that the program is both effective and important. Refilwe Africa, 30, the media director of loveLife, says she was “hooked” by the program’s message when she joined the company five years ago. In a phone interview, she enthusiastically explains why loveLife works.

“A young person who is confident,” she says, “is less likely to engage in risky behavior.” This idea of empowerment drives loveLife’s message. The program uses flashy media campaigns to encourage students to delay sex, but doesn’t preach abstinence. Several commercials focus on youth who’ve turned their lives around after teen pregnancy and involvement in gangs. LoveLife radio programs, broadcast in all 11 of South Africa’s official languages, encourage young people to take responsibility for their own health. Billboards around the country urge teens to “Make Your Move,” loveLife’s most recent empowerment message.

Refilwe argues that youth need to feel empowered just as much as they need to understand why safe sex is important. “How many times can you say to a person, you need to use condoms before they get bored?”

LoveLife’s most important work happens “face-to-face” in its youth centers, she says, where teens can participate in sports activities and computer classes. Young people aged 18 to 25 volunteer to be “groundBREAKERS” and run programs, spreading the message of HIV prevention to people a few years younger than them. LoveLife also partners with public health centers, operates a national telephone support line and publishes a magazine.

Research shows that a non-moralizing approach works, according to loveLife CEO David Harrison. He points to a 2003 study by the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg that showed that youth who participate in loveLife programs are less likely to have HIV.

But some say that studies like that are flawed because they are based on a self-selected group that is already at less at-risk for HIV infection.

“In some instances, they have claimed impacts on the basis of poor science,” wrote Dr. Warren Parker of the South African-based Centre for AIDS Development, Research, and Evaluation (CADRE) in an e-mail. “Unfortunately, these claims were used to leverage large amounts of funding.”

Other critics argue that loveLife ultimately glamorizes sex. “The focus of loveLife, whatever their pamphlets might say, whatever they might say when asked — most of their efforts went into promoting condoms and feeling good about sex,” says Harvard researcher Dr. Green. “I’m all for guilt-free sex. But that was not the message that South Africa needed.”

LoveLife is currently funded primarily by the South African government and by the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation, a California-based non-profit organization. Controversy has cost the program other funding in recent years: The Global Fund to fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria withdrew its grant in 2005, explaining that loveLife had not “sufficiently addressed weaknesses” in its prevention strategies.

“Three years down the line, my first response is still that it’s an absolute tragedy,” Harrison says about loss of the grant. “No other youth program has been so rigorously evaluated in the world. I’m afraid there [were] other things going on there. There was huge pressure from [conservative] Americans that loveLife didn’t get any further funding.”

So the problem behind the HIV pandemic is not education. It’s not promiscuity. What about condoms?

“Condoms have simply not worked in Africa,” Dr. Green says. “No country has been able to achieve high rates of condom use.”

About 90 percent of South Africans have easy access to condoms. But only half of South African youth reported using a condom the last time they had sex. According to Green, it’s easy to point the finger at South Africa for lack of condom use until Americans look at their own numbers: A 1995 study showed that only about two-thirds of American teenagers used a condom the last time they had sex.

As it turns out, Americans have more in common with South Africans than they think. Citizens in both countries have similar profiles in terms of knowledge about HIV transmission, number of sexual partners, and condom use. Why, then, is the HIV epidemic in South Africa getting worse while the epidemic in the United States is drawing to a close?

In her book The Invisible Cure, Helen Epstein writes that the chances of getting HIV during unprotected vaginal sex in a one-time sexual encounter with an HIV-positive person are around one percent — higher if the infected person recently contracted the virus. If that single encounter evolves into a relationship, the person infected with HIV only has an 8 percent chance of passing it on to their partner over the course of one year.

Simply put, HIV is a difficult virus to transmit.

According to Epstein, sub-Saharan Africa’s soaring HIV rates are are the result of an often-ignored sex practice – people having multiple long-term relationships at the same time. In parts of Africa, such as Uganda, around 40 percent of men and 30 percent of women report relationships that overlap for months or even years. In the U.S., Epstein argues, people are more likely to stick to one partner at a time.

“If an American contracts HIV from a boyfriend, she probably won’t pass it on to anyone else until the couple breaks up,” Epstein writes in her book.

“If a man with two long term partners contracts HIV,” she continues, “he will very likely pass the virus on to both of his partners in a very short time. If either of his partners has another partner, these ‘partners of his partners’ will very soon become infected too.”

Epstein uses Uganda as the example for her theory because it is the only African country to have seriously reduced its HIV rate. In the early 1990s, HIV rates peaked in Uganda at about 15 percent and then began to fall. Between 1991 and 1998, prevalence dropped by half.

Suddenly, everybody wanted to know what was happening in Uganda. If the reasons behind its falling HIV rate could be found, researchers argued, they could be applied to the rest of Africa and the epidemic could be stopped.

The problem was that nobody seemed to agree on what those reasons were. Some studies showed the decline came from condom use. But according to Epstein, condoms were difficult to get in Uganda until the middle of the 1990s, and condom advertising was banned by the government in 1994.

“As researchers start to pick through the reasons for this success, one troublesome fact emerges: condoms had little to do with it,” wrote Suzanne Leclerc-Madlala, an anthropology professor at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, in a South African newspaper in 2002. “Ugandan men never really took to condoms.”

Others, including former University of Cambridge researchers Dr. Rand Stoneburner and Dr. Daniel Low-Beer, say the key in Uganda was partner reduction. Epstein points to the Ugandan HIV prevention program Zero Grazing, which urged people to stick to one partner.

But even if Epstein, Stoneburner and Low-Beer are right about partner reduction and HIV prevention in Uganda, the question remains: Would it work in South Africa as well?

“I know more people [in South Africa] who are involved in concurrent relationships than not,” wrote David Patient, an HIV/AIDS activist that has lived in both South Africa and the U.S. and has been HIV-positive since 1983, in an e-mail. “It’s a way of life here. It’s like the old polygamy lifestyle of yesteryear has been ‘upgraded’ to reflect current socio-economic realities.”

The “polygamy lifestyle” that Patient refers to is still a reality in modern-day South Africa. Polygamy is legal and Zulus, South Africa’s largest ethnic group, traditionally practice it. Jacob Zuma, president of South Africa’s largest political party, the African National Congress, is Zulu and has at least three wives. He is also currently in position to become the next president of South Africa.

Workers migrating from rural areas to city centers might also encourage multiple partnerships and the spread of HIV. Many young men are forced to leave their rural homes in search of work, and end up in mines and factories in large cities such as Johannesburg. They can only return home to their families, and wives, a few times a year. Taking on other partners in the city is common.

“When the U.S. got involved in prevention [in sub-Saharan Africa], I was trying to advocate early on that they would seize upon what was happening in Uganda,” says Stoneburner, who worked for the World Health Organization in the 1990s and is now an independent researcher. “This was in 1996, 1997, and you just couldn’t get anybody interested in [partner reduction]. I was just flabbergasted by it all…[Americans] were terrified almost of hearing that it didn’t appear to be condoms in Uganda. They just literally shut down and sort of denied it.”

According to Stoneburner, American foundations poured money into promoting condom use and HIV education in sub-Saharan Africa in the 1990s. The idea that faithfulness, rather than condom use, prevented transmission was not a popular explanation for Uganda’s changing HIV rate.

The denial stems from “fears of preaching morality and identifying with the faith-based sector” according to Leclerc-Madlala.

Susan Watkins, a sociology professor at the University of Pennsylvania who has studied the HIV epidemic in rural Malawi, says that promoting safe sex was the only politically correct HIV prevention plan in the 1990s.

“[Condom promotion] seemed to be consistent with reproductive rights,” she says. “You know, we don’t tell people what to do.”

This 90s consensus — don’t moralize, promote condoms — seems to have held strong in the United States until the political tide began to turn. When George W. Bush was elected president in 2000, abstinence sex education gained massive government support both at home and abroad.

“When some of the Ugandan data came out, [conservatives were excited] that it was personal behavior,” Stoneburner says. “It would sort of promote their moral beliefs of how people should behave.”

In sub-Saharan Africa, the Bush administration quickly latched onto what has been coined the ABC approach – abstain, be faithful, use condoms – that seemed to be the answer in Uganda. The problem with ABC, critics claim, is that there’s too much focus on abstinence.

Bush’s PEPFAR allocates one-third of its prevention funding for abstinence-until-marriage programs. PEPFAR has been criticized in the press for promoting “neo-colonialism” and the President’s own religious views.

On April 2, PEPFAR was reapproved by the House of Representatives and its funding increased to $50 billion. But this time around, the abstinence clause has been removed, much to the chagrin of conservative politicians. The bill still needs to be approved by the Senate.

Political bent is a huge factor in international aid, Watkins says. And the debate in Congress over which approach to HIV prevention in sub-Saharan Africa is better — sex education or abstinence — tends to leave partner reduction out in the cold. American aid organizations of all political and religious stripes fund programs which endorse their views, often polarizing HIV prevention into two camps. The “be faithful” message has become the lost middle child in the “ABC” spectrum.

What does the CEO of one of South Africa’s largest prevention programs think about the theory of partner reduction in Uganda?

“Nobody knows what happened in Uganda,” Harrison says. “Nobody knows what caused the decline. Various interpretations have been attributed to it.”

But Epstein maintains that the data points to partner reduction. “It’s very clear what happened in Uganda,” she says in a phone interview. “Anybody who tells you otherwise is trying to protect a large number of careers.”

Harrison refers to the concurrent partners theory in an e-mail as “the flavour of the month” and says that focusing on it “doesn’t really change the decades-old instruction of ‘faithfulness’ in partnerships.” According to Harrison, the problem isn’t the lack of focus on partner reduction in South Africa, but the fact that nobody’s listening.

But Dr. Green says that loveLife’s pro-sexuality message doesn’t put enough focus on abstinence or partner reduction.

“I’m not a prude,” he says. “But I think we should be putting money into things that work and save lives.”

Harrison maintains that the loveLife approach is part of a broader solution, one that includes abstinence, partner reduction, condoms and empowerment.

“There is still an overwhelming HIV epidemic, so quite clearly none of us has found the Holy Grail,” he wrote in an e-mail. “Unfortunately, given the ideologically polarizing nature of sex (and the desire for proprietary ownership of ideas by the big funders), it’s far more expedient to present strategies as in competition, rather than complementary.”

“It gets to be a very nasty debate,” Stoneburner muses. “The Bush administration and PEPFAR is always beaten up because of the rigidity of funding. And when you talk to the opposition…they say that it’s condoms.”

But, he says, it seems like some people are “finally warming up to the idea” that the answer to South Africa’s HIV epidemic might be a “middle-of-the-road” approach involving many solutions.

“I give up,” I told him in our last conversation. “Pat Benatar was right. And this girl is war-weary.”

“Well, kiddo, that’s no good,” he said, appropriately sympathetic. “That’s how I felt a couple of weeks ago. Not anymore, though.”

“No?” I said bitterly. “Wait, let me guess. You found the love of your life… again.”

“Oh, no, nothing like that,” he said, cheerily. Too cheerily. “I decided to be abstinent for the next couple of months.”

What? I had to ask him to repeat himself, just to be sure I’d heard correctly. He confirmed that, like a Buddhist monk or a Catholic priest, he’d taken a vow of celibacy. Something about giving himself “time to think.”

I was dumbfounded. Until I started to think about it: Perhaps a period of self-seclusion isn’t such a bad idea. Especially following a period of turmoil. Imagine all of the bad rebounding decisions that people could avoid if they gave themselves “time to think” after a breakup.

But post-breakup isn’t the only time when sex makes things more complicated: What about being up to your ears in classes or focused on some other important goal which requires no distractions? Muhammad Ali famously abstained for six weeks before a big fight. Perhaps he was on to something.

Sex can be affirming, incredibly positive and good for your mental health. And then there are those times where you mentally kick yourself during an early-morning walk of shame.

Maybe taking a break brings better decisions and new appreciation. Which is why, my devoted Carnal Knowledge readers, I’ll be taking time off from writing this column, effective Spring Quarter.

Writing about sexuality since the beginning of my sophomore year has been a fascinating and often hilarious journey. The point was to educate — a one-woman crusade against abstinence-only sex education. Carnal Knowledge: showing you where the clitoris is located since 2006!

The decision has come partly because I’m going to be doing Medill’s required journalism residency this spring in a foreign country. And partly because, well… I need a break.

In a phrase, readers, it’s not you. It’s me.

As a breakup gift (no, no breakup sex for you), I’ve made a list of the most important — and the stupidest — things I’ve learned since I started writing this column:

• Your college relationships will not last forever. Even if you’ve found “the one,” you’re still only 20 years old. Isn’t the point of school to learn some skills before entering the real world?
• College students really do think they’re somehow exempt from getting sexually transmitted infections. Northwestern’s $48,000 price tag apparently gives your genitals super-immunity. Know what else it gives you? A complete lack of communication skills.
• The vast majority of college students can’t name the most common STIs. Or even know how they’re transmitted. Even the biology majors. Especially the biology majors.
• The two “P” words people are most squeamish about: prostates and periods.
• Strip clubs are not brothels. Well, maybe some.
• College students think having a “friend with benefits” is going to be fun. They’re almost always wrong.
• Writing a sex column gives people license to think absurd things about your personal life.

In the end, what can I say that hasn’t been said before? Here’s an oldie but a goodie: Northwestern students are supposed to be really, really smart. But when it comes to sex, we can be really, really dumb. If we applied the same determination that we do in the classroom to our sex lives, we would be protecting ourselves better, communicating more openly and getting laid more often.

It’s been swell, kids. Play nice next quarter.