If You Want To Fight Cancer, Turn Those Pink Ribbons Green
By Jennifer Browdy de Hernandez
06 February, 2012
CommonDreams.org
I'm going to make a confession. I never could stand those pink ribbons. I've never done a "Walk for the Cure" or bought daffodils for cancer victims or even picked a cancer-cure-themed postage stamp.
I'm glad to hear that the Komen Foundation has bowed to pressure and is restoring funding to Planned Parenthood, a worthwhile organization if there ever was one.
But in general, the idea of putting the energy and effort of well-meaning citizens behind "the search for a cure for cancer" just irritates me, because let's face it, we know what causes cancer, and therefore we can do better than cure it, we can prevent it! Maybe not 100%, but we can take it back to the modest rates that previous generations of human beings enjoyed.
For my grandparents' generation, a diagnosis of cancer was frightening because it was so often a death sentence, but it was rare. Not one of my four grandparents came down with cancer, and I don't believe their parents did either. This isn't due to some genetic serendipity, it's just a fact that cancer rates in the first half of the 20th century (and every century before that) were way lower than they are now.
Cancer rates are skyrocketing now thanks to the environmental toxins that humans have introduced into our air, soil and water, and thus our agricultural crops, drinking water and the very air we breathe. Rachel Carson saw the effects of DDT on birds, and gave the warning just before she succumbed to cancer.
We may have removed DDT from the US market, but it's still being used in other countries, and here it has been replaced by a whole host of alphabet-soup chemicals, each one more potent and carcinogenic than the last.
If you really want to make a difference in the war against cancer, forget about those ridiculous pink ribbons. Use the power of your wallet and your ballot to insist that the government step up and do its job in regulating the industrial agriculture sector.
Or better yet, let's allow the specter of industrial agriculture to fade away into the dustbin of the 20th century, and start a real "green revolution," dedicated to the health and well-being of our planet and all her denizens.
What color is your ribbon? Mine is green.
Jennifer Browdy de Hernandez teaches comparative literature and gender studies with an activist bent at Bard College at Simon's Rock in Great Barrington, MA and blogs at Transition Times.
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