Look at all that pink respect for breast cancer! Breast cancer awareness, I mean to say. As Marie has pointed out, women’s basketball over the weekend was draped in custom pink uniforms for the cause of cancer. “Cause” is an unfortunate pun, actually. No one’s interested in raising awareness of the cause of cancer.

I saw some coaches awarding Coach Yow a symbolic check for $10,000, to go “100% to breast cancer research” the announcers were happy to point out: “Not 93%, or even 99%, but 100% to research!” That’s good. If it had gone toward raising awareness [through ad campaigns], that money would be going 100% back to the television network.

About medical research, I have to wonder, if it weren’t for private fund-raising efforts, would there be insufficient research for a cure for cancer? Without Jerry’s Kids, or Walk for a Cure, etc, would it not be in the public’s interest to cure diseases like cancer? Are the 50,000 women diagnosed with cancer each year going unnoticed? Is the Health Department not picking up on the trend?

Whether our medical/industrial system wants to cure cancer is a matter of reasonable doubt. From a management perspective, can our society afford to stop this natural-seeming population trimmer? Breast Cancer preys generally upon women of post-reproductive age. Is our economy terribly concerned about the longevity of a less productive population segment?

Breast Cancer awareness would appear to be more about remembrance, about honoring those women who’ve lost the lottery of industrial toxin exposure. What about awareness of what’s causing cancer? We’ve researched causal-links plenty. Perhaps we should be raising money to go toward awareness of the cancer culprits. Let’s see if the media talking heads will speak so glibly about that!

Aren’t we learning that cancer behaves like rust? Cancer is oxidation, it’s, well, a cancer, in the figurative sense. Cancer is decay. It can be thwarted by proper avoidance of carcinogens, such as cigarette smoke, pollutants, or toxins. We know the sources of carcinogens: industry, chemicals, manufacture of plastics, poisons, toxic foods, etc.

How does wearing pink make any of that more visible? We’ll cure cancer when we arrest the causes. When we, literally, arrest the purveyors.