Success Quote by David Geffen

A businessman talking like a mourner is the point. Geffen’s line weaponizes his own unlikely credibility: he’s not a doctor, not an activist by trade, but someone whose world runs on attention, reputation, and the brutal arithmetic of losses. By pairing “growing” with “public apathy,” he turns the AIDS crisis into a double epidemic: the virus spreads, and so does the cultural habit of looking away. It’s not just a warning; it’s an indictment of the audience’s shrinking capacity to care.

The phrasing is deliberately plain, almost corporate in its symmetry. “HIV infection and AIDS is growing” reads like a grim quarterly report. That’s strategic. It implies we’re treating human catastrophe as background data, while the public’s emotional markets have crashed. Then the sentence swerves into intimacy: “We have already lost too many friends and colleagues.” The “we” is doing heavy lifting, collapsing private grief into a communal ledger. “Friends and colleagues” also signals a specific ecosystem - entertainment, art, philanthropy, media - where AIDS hit hard and early, and where Geffen’s influence could actually move money, policy attention, and press.

Context matters: at the height of the crisis, apathy wasn’t passive; it was politically cultivated, entangled with stigma against gay men, drug users, and marginalized communities. Geffen’s intent is to puncture that moral distance. He’s saying: this isn’t someone else’s tragedy, and your indifference is part of the machinery that keeps it going.