Effecting A Cause (Nurturing the Mutant Cell)

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.

The more I read about the agents in our environment such as plastics and chemicals and waste-products in everything from soda to deoderant to toothpaste to our food containers to our drinking water, I can't help but think that we bring so much of this on ourselves. Justifying those chemicals or obscuring the truth of the effects of those things we use to bring us comfort or ease in our lives does not mitigate the actual consequences.

The more I see people spouting lies and obvious falsehoods that do nothing to bring us closer to truth but only to perpetuate the toxic lifestyle that most of us engage and foist upon the rest of the world in so many ways, as well as to muddy up the public dialogue and the mechanisms we use to uncover truth, and further the interests of ignorance or greed at the same time—I can't help but think that we bring so many of these spiritual ills into flesh, give them a shape and a place to manifest in our bodies and our lives. Arranging things backward in our minds does not undo the facts.

I tend to think in broad philosophical terms, and someone might be tempted come along and insert tiny arguments or links that dispute various minor points in the thesis I'm delivering. They are free to do so. But I would not argue them. I have no need to argue them. If you disagree, live that way. Me, I am convinced of nature enacting a balance and exacting a toll for that which strives to evade such a balance.

If we continue to ignore this truth, it is at our own peril.

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