What Surviving Cancer Last Year Teaches About What The Nation Is Suffering This Year

You never think the worst thing imaginable can actually happen. But sometimes it does. And when it does there is not a moment to lose coming to terms with it so you can start to do what needs to be done to deal with it. Because whether you are suddenly facing being diagnosed with a virulent cancer, or your centuries-old democracy is collapsing at the hands of a lawless autocrat, there is nothing to do but start fighting, and fast, if there is to be any chance of saving what matters.

Delay is not your friend when you are being rotted from within. There is nothing to be gained by letting the garbage further metastasize. The more its poison spreads, the harder it is to get rid of it, and the greater the cost. The clock is ticking, and rapidly, because there will also come a point, and soon, when there is simply too much damage to recover from if the destruction is left unchecked.

Nor is denial any sort of ally either. The delusion that everything is fine can only be maintained for so long, because during every moment that no action is taken the cancer is meanwhile compromising everything it touches, depleting whatever could have been marshalled against it, until it will eventually be too late to finally decide to take effective steps against it. It will work its way until it kills the whole.

Because a cancer doesn’t stay put, eating away at only one spot. It will inevitably move to take over more. And in the meantime its presence weakens the ability to resist it, as it strains the immune system it has overwhelmed and leaches, for its own selfish purposes, the resources a healthy response requires. A cancer doesn’t care that doing so much damage will ultimately destroy what it itself depends on. It has no lesson to learn, because cancer is not rational. Its only goal is to entrench its malevolence, no matter how self-defeating its success will turn out to be. For cancer the ruination is the reward, a reward it needs to be deprived of as absolutely soon as possible.

So there is no negotiation to do. There is no yielding of anything to it in the hope that the cancer will be satisfied with whatever has been sacrificed. No appeasement of cancer is possible, because its appetite is insatiable. It will take whatever it wants if not stopped. There is no honor to appeal to, no conscience or even logical intelligence to convince to end its rampage. It doesn’t care about the worth of what it is working to kill, or how many will suffer from its loss. There is nothing to be reasoned with. Cancer just doesn’t care.

The only thing to do with cancer is fight it. And that means a real fight, with more than just harsh words, or a flash of strength with no follow-through, and from the moment the danger is discovered. True, fighting cancer is hard, it can hurt, and the cure may sometimes even seem to rival the disease. Also, the nastier the cancer, the longer it has been entrenched, the harder the fight will be to excise every tumorous growth that has been embedded and make sure that no remaining malignancy will ever be able to take hold again. But the sooner the fight begins the less destructive the means needed to beat back the threat, and the more likely that the patient will survive.

And no one needs to take on the fight alone. There is support in the community to be leveraged and expertise to be tapped into. There are plenty of people vested in the well-being of what is to be saved, ready, willing, and able to join the fight to save it. Cancer is not popular; people understand that cancer is bad and want to do something about it. It is important to tell them what is going on, because a key part of the fight is rallying them together to do what needs to be done.

Including afterwards, to heal what the cancer has weakened and fortify whatever vulnerabilities it was able to exploit. It will also require eternal vigilance to make sure neither it nor any other cancer can strike again. But the exciting part is figuring out how to come through this crisis healthier than before. And there’s no reason that planning for how to build back better can’t start now, to keep everyone focused on what is being fought for.

But not instead of, or at the expense of, what is needed to first win the day when the cancer will finally be gone and its quarry released from its clutches. No recovery can begin until this kind of acute existential challenge is first overcome. If there is ever again to be anything else to fight for, the cancer must be fought first. If there is to be any sort of future at all there simply is no other choice. Because the only other option would to surrender to it, at which point all will be lost.