Written By : Kathy Shaidle

I blogged about this last week, and it turns out Ann Althouse and Andrea Harris agree, so…

Shut up about breast cancer awareness. We are so ‘frickin aware I’m gonna vomit. People are always “raising awareness” about things everybody knows about. It is the activism of cowards. Especially women, who are so desperate for safety and approval.

When I got lupus there was this big pull to “get involved” with what I call the “bourgeois disease complex”: the annual “months” and ribbons and in the case of lupus, corny mascots like butterflies. I think I willed myself into remission just to avoid it. It was all so… female. Ugh.

Look: we all have to die of something eventually. This means you. Life is about pain and suffering, and compared to the last hundred generations, we’ve got it really good. Why can’t people just face that and spend their time doing something useful like reading a book or something?

And if you lost a family member to some disease… honestly? Nobody really cares. They pretend to because they think they’re supposed to but they only care about their own family and friends (if they’re normal). That “foundation” you set up in their memory: is it really contributing anything to the general welfare, or is it just a self-aggrandizing ugly t-shirt machine?

PS: Enough with the vigils and makeshift memorials to people I’ve never met, while we’re at it. I resent being bullied — gently, mind you, through female group-think, cheap sentiment and the whole cheesy teddy bear aesthetic — to pretend to care about a stranger. Your relative’s car accident was NOT 9/11, no matter what your “family spokesperson” says. (I give it three more years til we see the first law suit involving someone who wasn’t picked  to be “family spokesperson” and is mad because they were denied their chance to go on the local news…)

This sort of thing weakens the body politic and uglifies the public square.

Religion already has time tested rituals for coping with grief. It is an indictment of modern life that so many people feel obliged to invent their own, infinitely inferior, alternatives. There is certainly nothing “conservative” about this contemporary estrogen fueled phenomenon, and we should discourage it as much as possible.

England really started going down the tubes after the Lady Di Death Extravaganza. Think about it.

(Kathy Shaidle blogs at FiveFeetOfFury. Her book The Tyranny of Nice, about state censorship through political correctness, features an intro by Mark Steyn.)

0