Utopian Economics - Jim's Blog

Just to brag about my wonderful husband, he's created a blog/website at utopianeconomics.com. Take a look, there's a lot of eco stuff, musings about the world and links to other cool sites. Enjoy!

Why I Don't Do Breast Cancer Events

As all two of my "faithful" readers know, I had breast cancer (b.c.) 5 years ago. I'm fine now and celebrated my 5th anniversary in fine style, with a delicious"breast cake". Over the years I have done fundraising for the Life with Cancer program that was a real support for me and the kids during my treatment. But I don't do the Race for the Cure or other breast cancer fund-raising events.

   Why not?  The short, smart answer is, I don't know which t-shirt to wear. At these events the b.c. survivors usually wear pink t-shirts while everyone else gets to wear white ones.  While I don't have any trouble telling people that I have had b.c., I don't want it to be the first thing that people learn about me. It was an important event in my life, but not a defining one. (My vow during treatment was that breast cancer wouldn't make me a better person, and I think I succeeded!) I had it, I have that in common with a lot of women (and men), but its not who I am now. As I said to my therapist, Cancer is like a lemon -- very sour but you can't make a great salsa without it! Not the most important event in my life, but still powerful.

   Another reason that I don't support b.c. fundraising is the emphasis of the groups is on "the cure". Why aren't they focused on finding the cause of breast cancer?!? They never talk about prevention -- the closest they will come is "early detection," but still happens after the cancer has been caused.  In large part this emphasis on cure rather than prevention is because the corporate funding for these groups comes mainly from the companies that 1) stand to make a lot of money on cancer-treatment drugs and the research is supported by the fund-raising and 2) those same companies are the ones that make pesticides, herbicides, fungicides, etc. that are likely to be at the least big contributors to the development of cancer in the first place.

So those are my reasons for staying away from pink ribbons and walks and pink mixers, hats, purses, etc. that are sold to advance the cause of curing breast cancer. It's a nice way to make lots of money!!

Getting older; getting wiser????

I just got back from a long drive to NY and my ears are ringing. They've been ringing for a number of years now, but it used to be noticeable only when there was very little noise -- at night mostly. Now, I'm finding that I notice it even when there is other noise and it gets worse after I've been in the car for awhile -- the road noise plus music, books-on-CD, etc.

This is an ethical problem for me. Back in graduate school, in my medical ethics class, I wrote a paper about animal testing and why it was wrong. I took the position that animals should not die in order to cure things that people do to themselves volitionally. Most ironically, I used the example of researchers killing monkeys after damaging their hearing in order to better understand how human hearing gets damaged so they could fix it. Oh boy!...Now I need that knowledge gained from all those dead monkeys and I feel like a hypocrite and a murderer!

My hearing loss is my fault, but also the accumulation of many, small decisions made in the moment without considering the long-term consequences. Or, the short-term gains outweighed my concerns about eventually losing my hearing. So what will I do? Swallow my ethical stance or get left out of life?!