Not much else to say about Jessie Helms, except the more I read about the details of his tenure in the Senate, the more, well, the more I can say that the world will be a better place without. At least, the world was a better place once he stepped down. Supported all the genocidal dictators in Central America during the 1980s–what a compassionate guy. Well, so as long as they weren’t communist, it didn’t really matter how many people were tortured and killed under their regimes.

But I wonder, as I mentioned in my previous post, if Jessie’s deeds really started to catch up with him. From AP:

As he aged, Helms was slowed by a variety of illnesses, including a bone disorder, prostate cancer and heart problems, and he made his way through the Capitol on a motorized scooter as his career neared an end. In April 2006, his family announced he had been moved into a convalescent center after being diagnosed with vascular dementia, in which repeated minor strokes damage the brain.

Did the horrors that he supported, including his war on funding for AIDS, really manifest as health problems? Did he have a conscience somewhere, buried in the midst of all that hatred and bigotry. Afterall, Helms and his wife adopted a 9 year old boy in 1962 with cerebral palsy–so surely, there had to be a thread of compassion somewhere in his soul.

But at any rate, Helms suffered from a host of physical problems that just kept mounting. I view it as the poison in his soul finally poisoned his body. Maybe it was only after he was suffering and in pain from his illnesses, that he was finally able to feel compassion for AIDS victims.

Who knows.

I suppose that this is a strange blog entry, in that I am commenting on the death of Jesse Helms. There are blog entries and newspaper articles and essays all over the print media and Internet, and I’m sure you can hear all about ol’ Jess on any TV news station.

To say the man was controversial was an understatement, and I can safely say that I didn’t shed any tears when he finally retired from the Senate. He was sickly, decrepit, and maybe his conscience was catching up with him. I remember seeing a photo of him riding around on a scooter, an indication that his mobility was waning and his health was becoming precarious.

How ironic that he died on Independence Day. I suppose that he would think that confirmed him as a true patriot, and indeed, the news is full of people call him one. I kind of think a little differently; a man who excelled in marginalizing large segments of the population cannot be a patriot, any more than one who breathes hate and intolerance can be considered a Christian (think Jesus=love). He even called the University of North Carolina, the outstanding school from his own home state, a “university of Negroes and communists.” Believe me, he didn’t mean it in a complimentary way.

But I’ve gotten off track. I want to focus on one aspect of his career, and that is AIDS (my blog, afterall, is health related). It’s an interesting story about Jesse and AIDS, because he went from being “damn those gays, they brought it on themselves” and trying to block funding for the disease, to publicly repenting and working to help AIDS patients in Africa. Remarkable.

First, here’s a little rundown about Jesse Helms and AIDS from Tom’s Civil Liberties Blog at About.com:

Until his very last year in the Senate (when he finally agreed to support an Africa AIDS funding bill), Helms did everything he could to block federal AIDS funding (declaring AIDS to be a fair punishment for homosexuality) and led that charge throughout the Senate in the 1980s. Because of his partially successful efforts to delay AIDS research and prevention efforts, he is indirectly responsible for the early deaths of millions.

So what can I say positive about Jesse Helms? Well, he became less of a visible segregationist when it became politically unpopular to be a segregationist, and he grew less opposed to AIDS funding when it became politically unpopular to oppose AIDS funding. I guess that demonstrates some kind of moral progress, either on his part or on the part of his constituents. But most of all, he retired in 2002–and the life he has led since then was almost certainly much more noble, much more admirable, than the life he led in the Senate. Could he have become a good man over the past six years? Maybe so. Probably so. Let’s run with that.

Perhaps he realized that he was getting close to the end of his life, and maybe having so much blood on your hands is not the best way to enter the hereafter. Maybe he realized that his behavior was profoundly un-Christian, and he was having visions of hell and a smiling Devil beckoning to him. Because if he really believed in heaven and hell, then his actions on earth directed him to only one path (hint: he wasn’t going to be meeting up with St. Peter any time soon).

However, this is another interesting story about his conversion to compassion. An interesting essay about Helms by David Waters at the Washington Post, entitled “Under God.”

Helms, who had spent many years slashing foreign aid budgets, had rendered his judgment on AIDS loudly and clearly. In 1995, for example, he told The New York Times that the government should spend less money on people with AIDS because they got sick as a result of “deliberate, disgusting, revolting conduct.”

But after talking to Bono, Helms apologized and said he was ashamed. “I have been too lax too long in doing something really significant about AIDS,” Helms said.

What did Bono tell him?

“Christ only speaks about judgment once and it’s not about sex but about how we deal with the poor, and I quoted Matthew, ‘I was naked and you clothed me, I was hungry and you fed me.’ Jesse got very emotional, and the next day he brought in the reporters and publicly repented about Aids. I explained to him that AIDS was like the leprosy of the New Testament.”

If a rock star can have that sort of impact on Jesse Helms, there’s no telling what Jesus can do.

What strange bedfellows, Bono and Jesse Helms, but maybe it did actually happen this way. Although I suspect that Helms was already feeling some degree of remorse, that maybe he needed to embrace the 21st century and perhaps try to amend for some of the devastation that he was responsible for.

I hope that his change of heart helped generate funding for AIDS in Africa. I hope that at least one human being has been helped by his change of attitude.