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Sailing for the horizon
My Facebook feed is full of people saying, "Woah Patrick Swayze died!" My reaction, aside from profound sympathy for his family, is...duh. Cancer is not really a survivable disease; death rates have remained unchanged for basically the past 40 years. Every time I hear someone thoughtlessly talk about cancer per se as curable or survivable I more or less see red. If only for other people's sake, keep your ignorance (innocence?) to yourself.
To contextualize this little rant, it's been my experience that a lot of people--including some people who really ought to know better--have the impression that cancer is a preventable, survivable, even curable, disease. And while there are a lot of people who survive certain more benign cancers, usually with the benefit of early detection, it remains the plain truth that for most people who get cancer, it's what kills them. (And we can all play the "name the survivor you know (of)!" game if we like, but lucky exceptions do not rules make.) I recommend the Times series Forty Years' War for a lot of unvarnished truth on this front--the link is to the most recent article, which contains links to previous ones in the series.
It's not been a good day, month, or year for me personally on this front. Aside from Patrick Swayze, a family friend died of cancer today at the whopping age of...27. Yup, she was diagnosed with breast cancer at 24, had a double mastectomy in an attempt to retard the disease's progression, and is now dead. And of course, late last month Ted Kennedy died of advanced brain cancer. My father and I caught most of his funeral live, and we teared up at several points during the President's eulogy, as well as his sons'. At least he had the opportunity to live his life to the fullest before his death; I think that's the most anyone can really ask for--and he helped a lot of other people along the way, too.
On a less impassioned topic, I think this article in the Times, about over-employment and under-productivity in Japan, does a good job of sketching out the nature of the economic debate going on in Japan at the moment. Certainly I'd have to agree from my own experiences that over-employment is fairly common in Japan, at least in the service sector, and while it's certainly part of what allows Japanese retail, in particular, to offer such an extravagant level of service to its customers, at times I did think that some of that labor, in a perfect world (what's the economics term for that again?) would be better allocated elsewhere. But of course thanks to Koizumi's neo-liberal reforms, which at once went too far and nowhere near far enough, "elsewhere" would most likely be a low-paying temp job with few benefits that would be the first on the chopping block in bad times. Like now.
Of course this debate is playing out in the context of an evolving two-party system; it will be interesting to see which party stakes what part of the political spectrum, and what angle on these issues, for its own.
To contextualize this little rant, it's been my experience that a lot of people--including some people who really ought to know better--have the impression that cancer is a preventable, survivable, even curable, disease. And while there are a lot of people who survive certain more benign cancers, usually with the benefit of early detection, it remains the plain truth that for most people who get cancer, it's what kills them. (And we can all play the "name the survivor you know (of)!" game if we like, but lucky exceptions do not rules make.) I recommend the Times series Forty Years' War for a lot of unvarnished truth on this front--the link is to the most recent article, which contains links to previous ones in the series.
It's not been a good day, month, or year for me personally on this front. Aside from Patrick Swayze, a family friend died of cancer today at the whopping age of...27. Yup, she was diagnosed with breast cancer at 24, had a double mastectomy in an attempt to retard the disease's progression, and is now dead. And of course, late last month Ted Kennedy died of advanced brain cancer. My father and I caught most of his funeral live, and we teared up at several points during the President's eulogy, as well as his sons'. At least he had the opportunity to live his life to the fullest before his death; I think that's the most anyone can really ask for--and he helped a lot of other people along the way, too.
On a less impassioned topic, I think this article in the Times, about over-employment and under-productivity in Japan, does a good job of sketching out the nature of the economic debate going on in Japan at the moment. Certainly I'd have to agree from my own experiences that over-employment is fairly common in Japan, at least in the service sector, and while it's certainly part of what allows Japanese retail, in particular, to offer such an extravagant level of service to its customers, at times I did think that some of that labor, in a perfect world (what's the economics term for that again?) would be better allocated elsewhere. But of course thanks to Koizumi's neo-liberal reforms, which at once went too far and nowhere near far enough, "elsewhere" would most likely be a low-paying temp job with few benefits that would be the first on the chopping block in bad times. Like now.
Of course this debate is playing out in the context of an evolving two-party system; it will be interesting to see which party stakes what part of the political spectrum, and what angle on these issues, for its own.