Just when I thought it couldn’t get any more ridiculous I run across this. (Apologies for the saccharine Flash intro, which may make you want to get yourself a bucket — not a pink one). I’m often a little out of patience with the “Care2″ website, which seems breathlessly determined to find injustice and outrage under every bush and rock, but this sort of newsflash keeps me subscribing to their e-mails.
I have been sick of this Pink Crap For Breast Cancer business for some time now. It started innocently enough when people began remarking that the “red ribbon for AIDS” campaigns were well and good, but didn’t breast cancer kill a lot more people and shouldn’t we raise awareness about that, too? Fine, fine. Except that, so far as I can tell, the notion was almost immediately co-opted into a cash cow for pharmaceutical companies, mammography equipment manufacturers, research-grant hustlers and any corporation anywhere willing to slap a particularly nauseating shade of pink on its product — or even on a useless gewgaw — and say something about donating profits to “breast cancer research.”
So far as I can tell, no one has donated much to consciousness-raising about the flood of hormone-disrupting chemicals that women are invited to introduce into their bodies from every source imaginable: cosmetics (from gradeschool on), cleaning compounds, plastics, your neighbor’s chem-0-lawn service, and of course actual birth control pills and “hormone replacement.” No Pink Ribbon event has gone to war with the food industry over the agricultural use of hormones or asked why breast cancer rates started climbing about the same time we started living in a world saturated with chemical solutions to every problem and eating, as a society, “foods” that no one’s great-grandparents would have recognized. Nope, ladies, just wear this cute pink windbreaker as you thunder-thigh your way through the Race For The Cure event in your home town, and Get Yer Mammogram no matter what second thoughts research offers up about mammography’s usefulness or benignity. Keep on being good little consumers of the lifestyle that makes you sick and the medical combine that then turns around and offers you “hope.”
If the Pink Ribbon people cared, at this point, about anything but perpetuating a proven money-maker (race organizers anyone? event planners? Grant ho’s? Party favors?) they would be screeching Foul, you should pardon the expression, at the very idea of the Kentucky Fried Chicken people selling disease-causing, ecosystem-demolishing food in pink buckets.
I think I liked it better when people exploited boobs just by displaying them.
My very dear friend and “colon cancer buddy” Gaelen wrote this very intelligent blog post expressing some of your same pink issues.
Awareness of Everything but Blue
I haven’t had enough caffeine yet, so I’m not sure I’m going to say this correctly, but — it seems to me that when something turns into a Cause, personal awareness about it actually declines, rather than increases … for two reasons:
1) It seems to be “enough,” somehow, to participate on the fluffy easy surface levels offered
2) … and even if you don’t, other people are, so at least someone’s doing something.
I think genuine, lasting, awareness and change happen when intelligent, forward-thinking people are either personally affected by illness or tragedy and decide not to take it lying down; or when those same people decide to try to prevent a tragedy before it happens. Walkathons don’t raise awareness or change the world, IMO … they just make people complacent.
I’ve been working on a post about why I don’t run for a cure…I’m much closer to Melissa Etheridge in preferring to run for life, and to feel better about me.
The whole race-for-a-cure thing ignores that people need help now, and that help isn’t the holy grail ‘cure.’ It’s funding, support, insurance, support, counseling … did I mention support? We’re not going to get that to people in immediate need by focusing our energies on race/walks for the ‘cure’ for anything.
Actually, I don’t want so much to take off other people’s pink ribbons as I want to take ‘pink’ back as a legitimate color. I *like* pink (well, fuschia, really) and I’d like to wear a pink windbreaker or shirt now and then without having people assume that I’ve had breast cancer.
You keep grumpin’ away, girl. As for the KFC pink buckets…ridiculous and beyond!
“It’s funding, support, insurance, support, counseling … did I mention support?”
I remember being very impressed when Sharon Osbourne set up her foundation for colon cancer patients. Her whole thing was about direct support to people needing it *in the moment*, not for some cure that may or may not come.
She spoke about when she was going through chemo at home, with a live-in nurse, etc … and wondering how the hell people got through this on their own. Her foundation offers funding to help patients get through the rigors of treatment. You can check it out here (click on Support My Cancer Program):
http://www.sharonosbourne.com/
I actually can’t stand the colour pink, except in sunsets and occasional wildflowers. Oh, and Loki’s nose. I wouldn’t be caught dead wearing it.
Loki’s nose is beyond pink. It’s celestial.
Yeah, it is rather.
Gaelen — thanks for dropping in and welcome!
@All… it goes even beyond the haptic focus on one form of cancer or the sublime disregard for what people need right now more than the promise of a technological “cure” years into the future (damn good point).
What gets me is the absolute blinkered focus on CURE CURE CURE rather than “why are so many people getting cancer? Could it be… gasp… the air they breathe, the water they have to drink, the chemicals that surround them, the drugs they are told to take, the depleted food they eat?”
It’s very easy and simple minded (as David points out) to do these feelgood fundraisers and trust that someone will spirit away the money and use it to fix this horrible problem; unfortunately it’s not an analogy like the “magic bullet” antibiotics that shot down syphilis and other bacterial plagues (though over use of those is now breeding germs of steel, I note). And by the way, how much money gets laid out to set up these race and walk events? What’s the cut in the end? (Ironic again, per Gaelen, that the first promoted priority is not the immediate need for forms of care that are scarecely rocket science.)
I think corporate combines see a way to raise their goodwill quotient by associating themselves with what people imagine is a triumphant crusade in which they can participate. Maybe, they reason, it will distract concern from the 101 carcinogenic chemicals they put in heavily advertised cosmetics and appalling food, building materials, the aquifer, we could be here all day making a list.
I think the “health care” industry (quiz question: what job category continued to grow during the 2008-09 recession plummet when every other industry was shedding jobs?) sees a gold mine in every high profile event that promotes their orthodox approach to a problem that everyone would rather have prevented — prevented, not detected — than cured wehopewehopewehope.
Yes, I’m very, very cynical. And beyond frank opportunism and greed, I also see clearly that even more or less well-meaning medical people at all levels will circle to defend their definition of what constitutes the defense of health. Most of them have their whole identity, not just their incomes, invested in our continuing to accept their prescriptions and jump through their hoops. That may be even tougher to overcome than open exploitiveness.
Takes more than display to exploit a boob. I do approve of it however as a first step.
I would like to add a hearty “Amen”, especially to your comment where you address the REAL issue, which is why are so many people getting cancer in the first place? I have been pretty militant for a very long time about what kind of things I allow in the environment that I have control of, because I have believed for a long time that a carcinogen is a carcinogen, and “how much” of it I ingest is not the issue.
When the researchers check compounds for carcinogenicity, quantity ingested always seems to become an issue. For example, if you eat Reddenbacher’s microwave popcorn, you eat a quantity of TBHQ and some artificial butter flavor. tert-Butylhydroquinone has been shown to be carcinogenic “in high doses.” It seems to promote gastrointestinal cancers. Here’s the problem in my mind. If I eat a little TBHQ here, a little (carcinogenic) artificial butter flavor there, put a little xeno-estrogen on my face, inhale some with my shampoo, spray some neurotoxins in my environment to kill the bugs I can’t stand, you get the picture, how do all those chemicals interact with each other in my body? When you have 180 different carcinogens in your system, all of them in the small quantities that the FDA has deemed “safe”, then how do you know when the toxic overload for your system has been reached?
Let us not even go into the fact that the agencies who are supposed to be our watchdogs are susceptible to being bought off and lobbied at. Just because someone says “Well, saccharine is only carcinogenic if you eat this ridiculously large amount” does not mean that it is actually safe. Especially if it is being combined with alar, DEET, and yellow dye #5 at the same time in the chemical laboratory that is your liver.
This is why I do not use cosmetics, insect spray, herbicides, pesticides, and I try to eat organic food whenever possible.
Lastly, if you are still with me after this rant, it is absolutely true that if you buy a pink bucket of KFC they will STILL make a profit on that bucket. Someone who is sensitive and who cares may be driving down the street looking for a fast food lunch (that would not ever be me, by the way) and decide to put their dollar in the KFC bucket rather than the McDonalds bucket simply because they like the idea of the donation being made.
I truly enjoyed the link you sent us to, sledpress, until the blanket statement that chicken is not a healthy food was made. Not all chicken was created equal. Organic free range chicken is a healthy food.
I won’t argue with you about the organic chicken. I don’t eat it because I’m a vegetarian, but that is different from needing to claim it’s unhealthy to eat it. I actually might be a little healthier in some ways if I ate some free range meat, it’s just a personal thing with me about the animals.
As I said, Care2 tends to appeal to contributors who go over the top decrying anything and everything. But you can mine it for some good nuggets, if you’ll pardon the phrase.
Loved this blog re the pink stuff, which I hadn’t even thought of before, and the KFC soy feed for chickens. SO informative. Thanks much!
Someone is waking up, anyway:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/06/opinion/06kristof.html?src=me&ref=general
Some good comments under this KFC ad on the YouTube page.