For me, it’s foster kids with HIV. At 18, they are dropped at the side of the road, and the bus leaves them standing in a swirling dust. The kind of assistance federal dollars pay for community AIDS support is a quaint idea. It’s a systematically designed dysfunctional institution (hates kids) unless you live in a large urban context. Funding is the inaccessible wind unless you can drive 300 miles for one drug refill. Not free. Living in remote mountain communities where there is no medical safety net whatsoever, was not what anyone imagined. AIDS services in the Blue Ridge, is a health department filmstrip on STDs made in 1956, and I am not kidding.  What 1956 has to do with AIDS is anyone’s guess. Nurses’ hats. Foster kids who are no longer foster kids, arrive on my doorstep with no HIV meds. They arrive on my doorstep with guns. They arrive on my doorstep strung out, addicted, viral loads in the hundreds of thousands. By this time, the combination of meth, fentanyl, alcohol, sex work’s continued and unrelenting exposure to HIV, will kill them in hours, not days, and no one is looking ahead an entire year. Then, there’s covid. Walking time bombs. But I take them in. Or why am I here. Or why do the privileged families with kids in a college get such kind treatment at the NYT when we look at the behavior of upper middle class white children. It’s a rich bubble. To me. My kids are homeless. We have failed these children. That’s my doorstep. Not the State’s, and not yours.