Politics and Cancer

 I joined a group on Facebook for husbands of people with serious breast cancer. We're stage 4 with confirmed metastatic cancer in the liver and lymph nodes, and suspected metastatic cancer in the spine and spleen. This is insanely serious. 

The facebook support group has been amazing. There is a feeling of fraternity. I'm mean, it's a fraternity with the shittiest, worst membership requirements you can imagine, but the feelings of fraternity are transcendent of all of the things I thought to friendships important before.

One of the members who has had really helpful advice has a user name that is, let's say, extremely disparaging of President Biden. But it hasn't mattered at all. The support is there, because we all have a common purpose and a common goal, the health of our wives.

It reminds me of when astronauts would return to earth and say that if only everybody could see the earth from space, they would realize that what we have in common as humans far outweighs the tribal/national/personal differences that so divide us. So too it is with mortality.

I realize that the things I thought so important that I would avoid friendships over them pale standing next to an existential crisis -- a crisis that could and should have been solved for had we only spent money defeating this universal enemy of humanity rather than trying to defeat each other.

There are obviously some people who don't see others as human, or deserving of respect and good health, so this isn't universal. It is, however, very broadly true: once we see each other as fragile beings, on earth for a geological time blink of an eye, subject to death from inside, outside, pathogens, injuries, and even our own cells turning on us, we see humanity as astronauts see earth from space: Our commonalities far exceed our differences.