Making hash of hashtags

Your brain (Wiki Commons)

Your brain on Twitter (Bird's Nest Soup, Wiki Commons)

I don't understand Twitter. I don't want to use Twitter. I don't want to read Twitter...mainly because there is nothing to read on Twitter. I prefer the back of a nice big bottle of hair spray; lots of words there and at least some of them, unlike the words on Twitter, are understandable. Fragrance, for instance. But what the hell does #atozchallenge mean when it's at home?

I didn't understand Friends, either. Not the relationship; the show. A bunch of less than normally attractive twenty-somethings hanging out in each other's aesthetically challenged apartments doing the dumbest things since the TV commercials that gave the world "Wassup?" Example: Two of the Friends gormless dorks--and this was a scene chosen for a promo--install a big screen TV, sit down in matching recliner chairs like my father used to have, assume an even more vacant expression than they started with, and make some sort of mewling sound that would cause even Mother Theresa to kick them if she thought the sound came from a cat.

Before that, I didn't understand Seinfeld. It was a show about nothing. It said so. OK. I'll grant you that.

From Cheers to maternity

Before Seinfeld and the ping pong ball innards of shows that came after it, I understood television. There were actual shows on television about something. Cheers followed the lives of customers of a pub; some were likeable, some not. Some were accomplished, some not. None was as useless as the empty t-shirts and blonde bimbos on Friends.

Murphy Brown was about a woman journalist, a high-caliber woman journalist, and the bevy of character types who would be found in such a person's orbit. Each show set up a problem or task, and in 22 minutes, it was solved. Even Murphy's baby was born in 22 minutes.

It was a witty, clever show about people who had achieved something, not about Generation Sleaze layabouts who had no past, no future and an amount of present (or presence, depending on how you would like to parse that thought) equal to their past and future.

Facebook v. Twitter v. The Void

I understand Facebook. You can make contact with all your friends; those who have time to spare and/or something to say will engage. I regard it as sort of the broadcast version of email, which I admit is somewhat more useful in today's world than the telephone or snail mail. Although I still do really like sending and receiving snail mail. I, for one, can still handle a pen; I wonder if most people today actually are unable to write...that is, engage in penmanship to express thoughts, simple thoughts such a Thank You.

But Twitter? Twitter for crying out loud? On an average day, my Twitter page collects 215 tweets per hour, 99 percent of which I don't read. Of the one percent I do read, I wish I hadn't read 99 percent of those. That leaves precious little value there. It is a time waster. It is useless, except perhaps for convincing empty barrels that they are not empty after all. I mean, who the heck cares what Katie Couric thinks about anything, or whether she has had this year's televised internal inspection of her bowels? Oh, sure. Her late husband died of intestinal cancer. We KNOW that already.

Terminal nose picking vs. the void

But it does raise another question: Why do people, and even celebrities (who may or may not be people), champion a cause someone they know has died from? What if you had a close relative who died from picking his nose after gardening and a tiny slug larva got up there and crawled into his brain and had babies and croaked him? Would you then be duty bound to find or found an organization dedicated to preventing needless deaths by Finger-borne Garden Larva Cerebral Parasitism? I don't think so.

Why can't these people pick something they believe in to support--education, arts, gardening, space travel, any sport but football (which no one can believe in, anymore than one can believe in slow, fat men with broken teeth bashing each other for millions of dollars)? But no. They pick deadly things, cancer and heart attacks and suchlike, and then throw tons of their waking moments at it. OF COURSE cancer and heart attacks increase; you would expand, too, if most of the world was paying you rapt attention and spending its hard-earned income on you. You don't think so? You think these organizations are about cures? About as much as a pit bull is about cuddlywuddlykissypoo. It isn't the American Anti-Cancer Society or the American Anti-Heart Disease Foundation, after all. The money gives them power to make sure the disease--not the cure--is the only thing we think about. And fear. The words are used to induce fear, which induces us to part with cash, which, as noted, just breeds more fear. Yes, there is power in words.

Obama knows words; George...not so much

Don't believe that either? Think about it. Barack Obama won the White House by using words. If Al Gore had had words as good as Obama's--words more powerful than Bush's money--Gore would have won. If Gore's freaking lawyers had had words as good as the lying words of Bush's lawyers, Gore would have won. There would have been no hanging chads, no fascination with the sub-tropical Elvira known as Katherine Harris. No Iraq. No meltdown. And global warming would be accorded the significance--as something that will kill off future generations--it deserves. "Mission Accomplished" would still be a viable phrase, and not an instant joke whenever it is used.

Twitter is a word. It means the incomprehensible sounds made by birds. You might perhaps have heard the word birdbrain. Maybe you even know the definition.

I rest my case.

Are you devoted to cancer? No? Are you sure?

 

Ancient Greek terracotta plaque of woman with snakes, probably from devotional shrine. (Wiki Commons)

In college, the term self-fulfilling prophecy was used a lot, in many different contexts.

Later, when I studied Science of Mind, I began to see how it worked; whatever you focus on, you will experience. Focus, as one of  my aunts did, on what you are  going to do “when your ship comes in” and that ship will stay out in deepwater forever. My aunt died penniless, as she lived. If she voiced the “ship comes in” phrase once, she voiced it four million times. She was devoted to it, and it served her as she bade it to.

Dr. Wayne Dyer, guru of quantum physics for the masses
Dr. Wayne Dyer has popularized the notion of creating your own physical reality in two dozen books and myriad tapes. Here are a few of his titles dealing with the issues: You'll See It When You Believe It: The Way to Your Personal Transformation, The Power of Intention: Learning to Co-Create Your World Your Way, Change Your Thoughts - Change Your Life: Living the Wisdom of the Tao. All have been best-sellers.

And yet, people still don’t get it. Especially, those who make money and careers on reinforcing the misery of others don’t get it. Paramount among these is the Susan G. Komen Foundation.

Huffington Post ran a story recently about Komen’s vicious attacks on any other fundraisers who dare to use a term they use―but hardly invented―and the color pink in their efforts. HuffPo noted:

In addition to raising millions of dollars a year for breast cancer research, fundraising giant Susan G. Komen for the Cure has a lesser-known mission that eats up donor funds: patrolling the waters for other charities and events around the country that use any variation of ‘for the cure’ in their names.

One woman, whose unique dog-sledding fundraiser is called Mush for the Cure, said she was warned by the National Breast Cancer Foundation to trademark her fundraiser’s name before Komen came after her.

Pit Bulls for the Cure
Too late. Komen is fighting the woman’s trademark application and will likely prevail with its enormous self-protection war-chest.

But this isn’t about the depredations of a scurrilous do-gooder organization, exactly. It is about the devotion of American women to breast cancer, and of Americans generally to cancer generally.

My mother died of lung cancer that spread to her adrenal glands and every other place it could get a toehold. She smoked for years, and there’s little doubt it was causative. I have never given one single cent to a pancreatic cancer cure organization, nor will I. I might possibly give to something trying to shut down tobacco companies, but probably not. My mother’s choice to smoke was her own, as was her choice to give it up. The damage had been done, however, and she knew why she died. She accepted it, and faced it bravely and with dignity.

Why would I sully her memory by wrapping the rest of my life around finding a cure for the disease that killed her? Wouldn’t that unwavering devotion to cancer cause more of it, either in me or some unwitting person who got in the way of my devotion and therefore inspiriting of the disease? In the rubric of Dr. Dyer, Science of  Mind and numberless college professors, yes it would. And, since quantum physics―the underlayment of Dyer’s work, Science of Mind beliefs and self-fulfilling prophecies―is not only available, but has been amply proven as the mechanics of the universe, it is just plain ignorant to hold in mind anything one DOESN’T want.

The mind works in mysterious, but known, ways
Those who are devoted to cancer are going to say, “No, no, it’s the CURE we are devoted to.”

Really? Can you think about a cure without thinking deeply and often about the disease itself? Another precept from the three rubrics mentioned here is this: You can tell someone over and over “Don’t drop the glass”….and they will drop the glass. The mind latches onto the most prominent idea, which is not don’t, but drop. If you want to avoid broken glasses, you’d do better to say “Hang onto that glass!” In this case, hanging onto the glass is the operative, cogent phrase, the one the mind―looking for positive instructions to latch onto and direct the body to follow―accepts.

All that having been said, one thing is obvious: The Susan G. Komen Foundation is invested in the continuation of cancer. It wants everyone to believe in cancer, but only its own kind of cancer, breast cancer. In that respect, since women are multiple times more likely to get breast cancer than men, it is an anti-feminist organization.

It is also a self-perpetuating bureaucracy. Nothing it does can possibly, in the end, find a cure for cancer. How can an organization spending so much donor money on keeping other fund-raisers from contributing to research possibly find a cure for anything? Except of course poverty among its own executives and cadres of lawyers.

Time to let Susan G. Komen have a long, if undeserved, rest. Time to get one’s mind off cancer and onto life.

What about all those women dying of breast cancer? Very sad. But how many of them smoke? How many chose not to have children and breast feed, which seems to offer some protection? I would be among that later group, but not the former. I accept the risks.

Consider: Nuns get a lot of breast cancer, relative to all women. But they get a lot less cervical cancer, ostensibly because they don’t have sexual relations. One will die of something, usually caused by how one lives. Usually. There is chance involved, the odd safe falling on one’s head. There is genetics. There are probably factors humans will never understand.

One factor we can understand, however, is the self-fulfilling prophecy. As far as I can see, the Susan G. Komen Foundation wants everyone focused on breast cancer―but only Susan G. Komen breast cancer, the kind that opens wallets in their direction―all the time.

Good. Let them be. Pay them no mind, literally. And pay them nothing else. Then go on your way living, and not considering their coffins or their coffers anymore than the media forces you to.