Blaming victims for cancer crisis

The Boston Herald

When my mother was 44, the age I am now, none of her friends had cancer, none of her friends' children had died of the disease, she didn't have a long list of sick acquaintances, she didn't come home from work at night with yet another story about someone she knew who had just been diagnosed.

Cancer was not an epidemic. My mother couldn't rattle off the names of specific cancers and their treatments. The names and treatments didn't even exist, nor did the obituaries of 20, 30 and 40-year-olds who died after a long illness, or, far too often, after a short one.

The surgeon who, two years ago, told my friend, Caryn, she had breast cancer tried to minimize the gravity of the disease. He said it would be worse to have diabetes because that disease cannot be cured, but only controlled. The words were meant to assuage her fears, give her hope, comfort her. And they did. They have.

Yet the reality is that every day hope shrinks because every day more and more people are being diagnosed with the disease.

"One of every three people will experience a problem with cancer," state Public Health Commissioner David Mulligan announced this week. One of every three. This is hardly a "problem." It is a crisis.

But the news reports that cancer rates in Massachusetts rose by only 2 percent between 1982 and 1988, compared with a 7 percent increase nationally. This is supposed to be good news. Yet the facts are that the rate of breast cancer and lung cancer in Massachusetts rose 26 percent in those four years, kidney cancer among men jumped 52 percent, and Massachusetts women now have a 63 percent higher rate of brain and nervous system cancers than the national average. All this is bad news.

"There's a lot we can do as citizens" to prevent getting cancer, Mulligan added, as if to soften the blow of these bleak statistics. But Mulligan is wrong. There's precious little we, as individuals, can do.

I remember reading Gilda Radner's book, "It's Always Something," aching at her thinking that it was her fault she was sick, blaming herself for drinking too many Diet Cokes. Blaming saccharin and cyclamates, tuna with mercury, nightgowns with tris, asbestos in hair dryers, preservatives in bologna, Red Dye #2.

"What did I do wrong?" she begged to know. "What did I do to cause this?"

She did nothing to cause her cancer. Yet everyone who gets cancer thinks: It's my fault. It must be. I must have done something - because all the authorities blame the victim.

If we didn't smoke; if we didn't drink; if we ate healthier foods; if we exercised; if we lived more responsibly, we'd all live forever. That's what we've been programmed to think.

But it's a whopping lie.

No one thing causes cancer, everything does - the air we breathe, the food we eat, the water we drink, the world in which we live, which is too full of garbage and chemicals and poisons.

Radioactive waste was dumped for years in shallow waters off Boston, but authorities insist there is no risk to the public.

The army dropped chemicals over 40 states in the late 1950s to determine the effectiveness of scattering biological weapons in the wind. But the authorities use words like "no risk."

The milk we drank during the 1950s and 1960s was contaminated with radiation because of above-ground nuclear tests conducted out West. Fallout travelled in the wind and fell on New England pastures and the cows ate the grass and we drank the milk and today, nearly 40 years later, wood ash used to fertilize farmers' fields, is still contaminated with more radioactivity than low-level nuclear wastes.

And the standard line is that it's all safe. But it isn't. The Great Lakes are so polluted that you can't eat fish from them. Clam beds in our own back yard are closed. The earth, which is our home, is being poisoned, and we are being poisoned, too.

For more than 300 years during the Middle Ages, one of every three people on earth died of the Bubonic Plague. Doctors told the afflicted to drink melted gold and ground-up emeralds, to keep goats in their bedrooms, to wash with urine and to apply dried lizards to boils.

We may laugh at this now, but how much smarter are we, really? Soap and water were what finally got rid of the plague. Simple, basic cleanliness.

Today one of every three of us will get cancer. Why? Because our earth is a toxic dumping ground, which industry and government refuse to clean up. Instead they're depending on medicine to find a "cure," some modern alchemy akin to melted gold and ground-up emeralds, to make the plague go away.