Addition to Chapter 29 – Charities Go Through the Motions

(Added Dec 6, 2024)

Charity: Charities Go Through the Motions

Who wouldn’t want to be part of a worthwhile cause, making a difference in society that could benefit everybody? I imagine it feels good to support a movement that surely no one could oppose: fighting cancer.

Many charities have been founded to raise funds to support scientists and researchers in fighting cancer. The National Foundation for Cancer Research is one such group, and on its website they highlight their 51 years of work, with 5,300,000 donors and a total of $415,000,000 raised to help “make game-changing discoveries in cancer treatments, detection, prevention, and ultimately, a cure for all types of cancer.”

These are certainly admirable goals. However, I always hesitate to donate because these charities and cancer researchers studiously avoid the truth: causing cancer is extremely profitable for a variety of industries, including fossil fuels, plastics, pesticides, and more. Cancer is quite preventable; America’s rulers merely prioritize their wealth over the people’s health.

I was recently asked to donate to a cancer-research charity while paying at a grocery store, and I recall looking around at all the cancer-causing agents sold just in the store itself. Pesticides in food are strongly linked with cancer, and the vast majority of food for sale contains these pesticides. The food without cancer-causing pesticides is called “organic” and costs much more money. Food packaging has been found to leach hundreds of different cancer-causing chemicals into the food. As I looked towards the non-food part of the grocery store, I saw home cleaning products in which researchers identified 193 poisonous chemicals which off-gas into the air where they can be breathed by the whole family. Many of these chemicals cause cancer. Other toxic chemicals are coated onto “non-stick” cooking equipment. Some people are making a lot of money causing cancer, and this little survey only covers my grocery store!

Countless charities have supported countless researchers in “fighting for the cure,” seeking better ways to prevent, detect, and treat cancer. And yet anybody who pays attention knows how to end cancer: forbid people from producing cancer-causing poisons. To prevent cancer, make it easy rather than extremely difficult and costly to live without being exposed to these poisons.

As long as it remains legal and extremely profitable to make and sell cancer-causing poisons, selfish people will continue to do so and cancer rates will keep steadily rising. And while cancer rates predictably rise, charities and donors will continue to raise funds to meticulously study every aspect of cancer except its actual causes, and scientists will keep recommending ways to reduce cancer that carefully avoid offending the rich. When people learn to ignore the abuses at the heart of their culture, even charities merely go through the motions of fighting terrible diseases.

(All citations are available in the ebook.)