Stand up to Cancer.

Friday night’s program collecting for cancer was truly shocking. Having in the family a young dad with an aggressive haematoma and three friends already dead it’s close to home but in that reality the program’s overblown sadness, the pouting stiff upper lips and the dwelling on death and stolen opportunities isn’t present. It’s just human fragility, understanding and support. It was shocking because it reminded me of 1984. In the book there is a perpetual war with some far off enemy that we must be afraid of and protected from by Big Brother. Is cancer being framed as our ubiquitous enemy? The program could have been called, “You might as well give up now.”  Make a bucket list of futile pleasures and fade away. With 50% of us likely to get cancer according to the program, that’s ~ 35 million, what chance do you have? With roughly 200,000 hospital beds available that’s 150 per bed. In the face of this huge epidemic and an equally huge effort to find a cure I see very little work on what in our modern lifestyle causes it. Sure it’s not one single pathogen but doesn’t it call for an equally huge effort to find the causes rather than a cure? The program for all its appropriately expressed emotionality I found utterly distasteful, especially as I suspect living untruthfully an unfulfilled and stressed life has a lot to do with it. Might for example buying a DFS sofa to watch TV on rather than having a wild expressive dance and shouting how you truly feel put you on the waiting list?