CommentsFIRST PERSON--The most leading-edge research, which will hopeful find a cure for cancer now starts out with the surprising realization that all human beings are normally exposed to cancer cells already within their own bodies daily.
So why is it that we don't get cancer more often? Because a normal person's immune system can identify and deal with these cancer cells through its healthy immune system that identifies and eliminates these cells before they can do any harm.
So, the question that medical researchers are now asking in the process of developing effective treatments for cancer is: What causes the human immune system to become less viable and in some cases to be compromised by cancer? And what can we do to augment or strengthen the human immune system so that we don't get cancer? Hopefully, soon, there will be a cure based on the elimination of cancer by reeducating our own body's immune system in the process of identifying and destroying cancer cells before they ever manifest as a too often untreatable disease.
Surprisingly, human society or the body politic has always functioned in a similar manner to the human body. Like the human body, human societies grow and flourish for a long period of time before an often age related entrophy or social cancer sets in. This phenomenon is fed by the contradictions that have always developed between what a society says it stands for and what it has come to stand for. When these contradictions become too great, a rather predictable form of societal cancer develops, which ultimately leads to the decline and fall of that society.
This is a phenomenon that we have seen played out repeatedly throughout human history with the only difference over time being the ever-increasing magnitude of the final societal decimation that takes place when a society finally falls victim to its own inherent contradictions. As human history has progressed, all societies seem to be unavoidably on a path leading to an even more catastrophic and unprecedented decline and fall unlike anything that has come before.
What is different now, given the scope and magnitude of an unprecedented and unmoderated science driven "advancement" at any cost to our biologic and societal environment, is that this present societal cancer that is infecting the United States most likely will lead to the end of human civilization on this planet, unless, in the not too distant future, we finally and definitively deal with it in much the same way science is presently trying to cure physical cancer by addressing its underlying causes that in the case of our present and prior societies have never been addressed in a forthright manner.
Like the biological cancer that has always existed subclinically in our species with only occasional outbreaks of virulence, the social cancer that is presently exemplified by people like Donald Trump- and those that unquestioningly support him- has always existed in all prior societies. But in those earlier societies these folk’s precursors predictably and periodically fomented the outbreak of wars and other mass disruptions that ultimately caused them to back down, when they finally came to the realization that they too- and those they loved- were also in jeopardy. With Trump, such moderating factors no longer seem present.
The unprecedented and interrelated nature of overpopulation, global warming, and the renewed threat of nuclear war by a species, that has never had a weapon it didn't ultimately use, combine this time to not only threaten the serfs and the slaves, but also threaten the 1% oligarchs and their progeny. And yet the irrevocably cancer-like destructive nature and consequences of what the 1% is messing with now seems to go unidentified.
Has this latest societal cancer again overcome the checks and balances that once were our democracy's immune system?
(Leonard Isenberg is a Los Angeles, observer and a contributor to CityWatch. He was a second- generation teacher at LAUSD and blogs at perdaily.com. Leonard can be reached at [email protected].)
-cw
