A Republic of Cancer
America the Beautiful has stage four cancer. And We the People are carcinogens. We buzz inside this body, daily, congregating in virtual “cessmobs” of hateful and spiteful vitriol. Our noxious contribution continues to create our host’s acidic social environment. Our words affect like cigarettes, sugary sodas and poverty.
Our body is made up of almost three-hundred and thirty million individual cells. Each with a role to play, and dependent upon the rest to act as equally and effectively as the next. But our body has been invaded by the pathogen, fear. As this fear embeds in the belly, inflammatory anger erupts. In our current social climate, this mass of cancerous voices has grown into a tumor, threatening the existence of our Democracy as a whole.
As with fear, argument, and war, the cancer has no preference to any one ethnicity, place of origin, religion nor creed. This politically motivated dis-ease is not the work of a foreign invader, but the manifestation of our own individual choices. With each passing second, one after another, we embrace the cessmob mentality of Hate thy Neighbor.
This behavior of ours has created a host environment in which our positive member cells cease business as usual, gravitate toward, and become one with the malignant mass. This creates discomfort, and feverish rage within our body. Every cell that joins the tumor, and every voice that agonizes in harmful rhetoric, casting judgement over perfect strangers, devoid of consideration for another’s perspective and need, is killing our American Dream.
Fortunately, all is not yet lost. This endemic indifference is reversible. As with many cancers of a living body, identification and treatment are essential for the eradication of the cancerous mass. It seems like an over simplified solution to a complex, monumental problem — but it’s not.
The simplest way to achieve any goal seems difficult, even impossible, because it requires dedicated, if not constant practice. Ask any trades-person, scholar, musician, or athlete.
Those of us who wish to live in a healthy society must change our social diet. We must embrace the voices among us which seek de-escalation of this violently sadistic social media pastime. Quite simply: We all need to do a lot better. It could be as simple as cutting out the insults we use to demean one another on a constant basis.
Will it stop everyone else from calling you names? No. But will it enable you to enjoy your day, your workplace, and your family and friends a little more without the constant anxiety that our nation is on the verge of a second bloody and hot civil war? I know it will. I have “logged out” for days at a time, and I felt decidedly better about things. I urge everyone to try it.
My hope is that the spiteful, hateful, and harmful national discourse that so many Americans are currently engulfed by will continue to distill- and as those bound by addiction to hatred wither in effectiveness, rational people of all stripes will disengage from this fashion of bully culture, as one might lose interest in a passing fad. And that the divisive argument, insults, and misinformation-fueled rhetoric will become as socially unacceptable as smoking cigarettes, or spouse abuse. I think of its base, fear-based anger’s base, as a cancer. I visualize it as such. And right now, that cancer is attracting more and more cells as it grows as metastasizes.
Something MUST change in our body, nationally, to change its pH, and make conditions for the spread of our dis-ease less favorable, so that this cancer can be relegated to a benign mass, and these symptoms that manifest in our daily lives may cease to exist.
