To a friend younger than I: Maybe you think I'm getting too philosophical, but my understanding of cancer is, not that it's a cell that decided to attack the body, but a cell that simply decided to stop devoting every second of its existence to the well-being of the body. It grows like crazy, robs all the cells around it of what they need to exist, and the body dies. My Generation, the Boomers, embraced cancer as.......

To a friend younger than I:  Maybe you think I'm getting too philosophical, but my understanding of cancer is, not that it's a cell that decided to attack the body, but a cell that simply decided to stop devoting every second of its existence to the well-being of the body. It grows like crazy, robs all the cells around it of what they need to exist, and the body dies. My Generation, the Boomers, embraced cancer as the ultimate Way of being. Selfishness as love, the ultimate perversion. You young folks are the recipients of five thousand or so years of humanoids in too-complex societies that has brought the human species and all species to the doorstep of death. Like cancer cells we were blind to the fact that we were killing the body, but unlike cancer cells, we were willfully blind.  Denial, our ultimate achievement. For the intoxications of it I did my part of bringing us to death's door. For the joy of it I'm trying to move us away from that door. Sorry. So sorry.