by Stephen Aldrich
Most of us know someone who has contracted cancer, and all of us know someone who knows someone was has gotten cancer, and this alone makes activities such as Relay for Life extremely popular.
This popularity is a good thing – it shows that we are concerned with creating a better world as well as our large compassion for cancer patients. As far as our care for cancer patients is concerned, we try to do right by them.
However, I want us to consider thinking about cancer differently than we typically do, because in some ways I think it actually contributes to the problem. This problem is reflected in the phrases “fight against cancer” and “cancer victims,” for while these are catchy and play to our sense of justice, they mask something important.
Really the way we “brand” cancer is problematic, for our use of language fails to acknowledge a reality of the disease: we live in a cancer-provoking society.
Let me first explain what I am not saying. I am not saying that anyone who contracts cancer is doing so purposefully, and I am not saying that anyone deserves it. I’m not even saying that we contribute to the spread of cancer purposefully, or that we are its only cause.
What I am saying is that the way we live, personally and publically, dramatically increases the instances of cancer. As I said, we all know someone. The problem is that we never ask the question why.
Much of our failure to dig into the causes of the cancer epidemic stems from the ways we talk about it and how this affects our (in)ability to be socially and personally introspective. What do we mean when we say we are “fighting against cancer”?
I think that we are borrowing war language, and this is helpful in giving us a clear and focused enemy. The unfortunate side effect is that in the act of delineating and sharpening our opponent, we stop asking why it is the case.
When we fight the war against crime, we point to criminals and jail them, often failing to point to the circumstances which produce criminals and working to change conditions; in the war against cancer, we point to cancer and fight it, often failing to point to the circumstances which cause cancer and working to change the circumstances.
This also happens when we refer to cancer patients as “cancer victims,” for again, we make cancer the target. Working to cure cancer is important and good, but it is essential for us to address the circumstances which encourage it as well.
The truth is that cancer is not trying to kill us: it is a biological process of abnormal and unregulated cell-growth. At some point we need to acknowledge this fact. We also need to acknowledge that as a society we are causing cancer and that victims of cancer are usually victims of our gross national practices.
The kinds of industry we develop and maintain, the habits we deem as proper, and our (general) social ignorance and denial of the relationship between these facts and the spread of cancer are the true root causes of our nation’s burgeoning health problems.
Industrially, we actively promote cancer in many ways, and these are often linked to lifestyles we see as “desirable.” We want cheap gas and so we rally behind fracking (natural gas initiatives) and the construction of pipelines even though both of these are highly likely to / already pollute the water supply of thousands of Americans and the air we breathe.
Socially we also have a high demand for cheap meat, which means that we encourage the use of pesticides, chemicals and hormones in our food production. This contributes to the conclusions from scientists from the World Health Organization and Harvard, who have demonstrated a correlation between eating meat and cancer: according to the first, vegetarians were 40% less likely to contract cancer, and the second suggests that those who ate meat daily were 300% more likely to contract colon cancer than those who ate meat rarely.
These are just some of the ways we encourage the spread of cancer in our society through passivity in the marketplace and failing to examine the risks of our unhealthy and dangerous lifestyles.
But it does not have to be this way. In fact, there are many ways that you can opt out of a cancer-causing world and promote the health of human beings. For instance, you could:
• Seek to decrease your personal pollution through lifestyle change
• Eat less (or no) meat & eat foods which prevent / stop / fight cancer such as cruciferous greens, mushrooms, and onions
• Educate yourself and others about the causes of cancer and how we contribute to it
• Actively lobby local eateries to use more responsibly raised foods
• Work to bring better food choices to the poor who, due to living conditions, are unable to opt out of our national socially destructive lifestyle
• Fund cancer prevention research
There are many more ways to refuse our cancer-causing society, and if it is your desire to reduce the spread of cancer (certainly such actions cannot eliminate it: cancer was and will remain to be a problem due to genetic predisposition, gene mutation, etc) there are actions you can take.
Additionally, our actions in the marketplace can directly change the direction of corporate policies when they realize we are no longer willing to take part in ending human life to save fifty cents at the gas pump. If we truly wish to “finish the fight” against cancer, then it is time for us to change ourselves.
This is not a quick fix, certainly, and when we realize that we are colluding together at the expense of families ruined by cancer, it can be our gut reaction to deny and look the other way. But as any person who has lost a family member or friend to cancer will tell you, material comforts can never replace the value of a loved one. It is time for us as a society to live that way.
saldrich@capital.edu
