A Magical Cure for Lethargy? : Johnson’s vow to carry the AIDS message forward could wake up the nation

For most Americans, a decade of thinking of AIDS as amorphous and remote, a menace for others but not for this tight-knit family, has come to an abrupt end.

What happens next will be as bittersweet as the smile on Magic Johnson’s face when he told a shocked nation that he carries the AIDS virus, although he does not yet have AIDS.

He quit the Lakers and will live as normal a life as possible. Millions of people who have been touched by his electric approach to basketball and his charm off the court will watch and wait. They will also listen, because Johnson being exposed to the human immunodeficiency virus, more than any other American, means that it can strike anybody, not just “them.”

And because people will listen to Magic Johnson, he can teach Americans about HIV and AIDS as nobody has been able to do so far. He can spread the gospel of safe sex farther and faster than anyone would have dreamed possible before he stepped into the television lights Thursday.

The star’s disclosure touched President Bush in Rome, where he said he had not done enough in the AIDS battle and wants to do more. And it is entirely possible that Magic can turn around the apathy that had settled over Congress and the White House about the AIDS epidemic and can encourage government to speed up development of drugs and pay more for treatment and hospice care.

But because so many young people look up to Johnson, his influence is likely to be intensely personal. His announcement of what he called “another challenge, another chapter in my life,” is bound to spark a sea change in the way the vulnerable young think about the AIDS epidemic, the way they talk about it, and the things they do about it. It is bound, too, to increase awareness of the dangers in minority communities.

It is one thing to read a pamphlet or listen to a hygiene lecture that advocates “safe sex.” It is another to have an authentic hero as a spokesman in the battle to avoid HIV infection.

“I think sometimes we think, well, only gay people can get it--’it’s not going to happen to me,’ ” he said at his press conference. “And here I am saying that it can happen to anybody, even me, Magic Johnson.”

The shock is bound also to make parents and children discuss AIDS as explicitly as they should have all along, as a threat to be avoided in specific ways, not in abstractions but in terms as real as the fact that Magic Johnson is infected with the virus.

Magic Johnson racing down the court in another Showtime break was something to behold. So will be his taking center stage in the battle against ignorance about AIDS.