Although this is a poor comparison for a million reasons, I just put my beloved dog down a week ago. Helpless is the word here. Its incredible how many game-enders we casually flirt with everyday, how powerful illness can be, how illness makes us make tough decisions, how poorly we handle end of life issues, and how badly grief hits us. We purposely avoid thinking about this stuff, consider it taboo, and engage in gallow's humor for a reason.
Death is difficult. It never gets easier.
Never think your comparison isn't apt because it's "just a pet" :)
Time does help.
Maybe you can't do something about one particular person today but millions of more future deaths can be prevented.
Some of the people here will be dying "early" deaths in 10 or 20 years. You won't be saying: "well, you've gotta go someday when you have a couple of kids", for example.
You see, cancer was a tiny spot on radar just 50 years ago. Or 100 even more. So the question is - what happened? Have we somehow changed overnight as a spices? No we haven't. Perhaps what we intake changed because after all cancer has to come from something - yes! our water get polluted, our food get packed with chemistry (Dupont produces your tires as well as ingredients for your breakfast bread and is more into food business than ever), and also our air got more polluted than ever.
So before you feel good writing check to a non profit or think that adding a $1 to your bill in food market helps fight cancer, do any of the following:
- call your local officials and complain. while your complain might be a blimp on radar, the more complains then more your officials will notices. at the end they want to know what people like/hate about their community -- not to help you, but rather to help themselves win next election. - sign petitions for better oversight into companies like Monsato who are in business to sterilize you and force your friend-farmer to suicide through dropping their attorney's fees on them. - buy a water filter but also check with your local water supply they run statistics on water pollution. make sting if they are out of chart (most counties, they are) - educate friends on food quality. Have them stop looking at price but more on ingredients. just because something is 40cents cheaper, doesnt mean its okay. - educate your friends and family on high corn fructose syrup and sugar substitutes. - promote and make your friends aware of non-gmo organic movement - research and educate yourself and your family on list of ingredients and products that EU bans. EU is the last bastion of common sense when it comes to your family's health safety but with laws like TPP in place, Monstato will be able to sue EU countries and force them to sell products with ingredients that EU had good reasons to ban in the first place.
First, variety is the species of life.
Second, the reason cancer wasn't "on the radar" is because we didn't know much.
If you look into the history of cancer, it has existed forever. Wikipedia claims Hippocrate himself wrote about it! [1]
And as late as the 19th century, survival rate was around 10%.[2]
Your concerns have very little, if anything, to do with cancer. Monsanto didn't even exist in the 19th century.
Plus, we often didn't live long enough for cancer to set in. It's hard to die of cancer if you drop dead of typhus or TB first. Cancer is the end stage of life; it's what kills you if nothing else does. We've finally reached the point where a very large percentage of the population is making it far enough to get there.
Do you know how cancer biology works?
Accumulated cell and nuclear damage from an endless assortment of factors cause cells to enter disease states. When certain errant states that regulate cell proliferation and apoptosis begin to accumulate, cell populations begin to drift into the cancer territory.
The number one cause of cancer is life. There are accelerating factors in the environment, for sure, but cancer is simply an error state of our biology. It's the machinery of higher order life breaking down and entering a pattern that doesn't self-regulate.
What you said makes sense, but it is only convincing if you already trust the scientific institutions and believe in reductionism. And that, is unfortunately much less common than we would think.
The guy believes that there are poisons in everyday products, telling them that "damage from an endless assortment of factors cause cells to enter disease states" is not at all a refutation of their belief taken from their point of view. In fact, I expect that it even looks like weasel wording for exactly what they said from their point of view.
I think that on topics like this, it's important to expose the premises, the concrete basic facts much more than the conclusion, the general abstraction.