Man vs. Nature

TALKING POINTS MEMO takes a moment to ponder cancer and our inability to affect its occurrences.

It's been a sobering several days, with Snow's cancer recurrence and that of Elizabeth Edwards. It's a reminder that with all our technology, the best medical care available, which I'm sure both of these two have, we're still vulnerable to being stricken in the prime of our lives by organic processes emerging from within our own bodies that we cannot control.

—Joshua Micah Marshall, Talking Points Memo

But I wonder. I wonder about this way of thinking so common to our mainstream American dialogue. Perhaps we cannot control the mutant cells that go haywire and won't shut off their replication. But maybe "all our technology"—this agent that is positioned above to "control" these mutant cells—has more to do with nurturing the occurrences than we commonly acknowledge. Perhaps "controlling" these cancers should not come in the form of our typical "Whack-a-mole" responses to life's challenges (after the fact and chasing symptomology), but to a less Western approach—one of realigning with the natural order, heeding its hardly-subtle messages, and trying less to "control" it or arrange it to our own liking.

That is, perhaps what we look to for a cure—"all our technology"—is instead the very cause of our cancers.