IS CANCER MY UNIQUE SELLING POINT?

 (It is not always bravery to let silence fight the muscle of ignorance) 

When they first heard that I had testicular cancer (I think of it as with their eyebrows raised) they asked what I had been doing with my penis or my balls. If nothing appalls you, ignorance should. For a start, cancer is not an STI, and even if it was, this time last year, I was a virgin. I was, yeah... So it cans off the possibility of sex being the cause. Somebody suggested that masturbation was the cause, as if pleasing yourself once in a while had any relationship with breeding cancer. I am sure that half the adult male population of the world (a modest estimate, considering the statistics) would be all over the place with cancer in their balls if that were the case. The cause of testicular cancer is till date yet unknown, thank you very much. 

One day, I will be bold enough to talk about how we are satisfied to think that when bad stuff happens to people, they are always surely at fault. That by extension or by immediate actions, people bring about their own failures by leading it to themselves. They “attracted” it, so to speak. Lack of empathy keeps us looking the other way while the people who should be our focus, suffer. Because in the subconscious place of our mind, we are satisfied to think that victims see their victimization coming, and were they any wiser, would have steered clear of it by some basic act of genius, or worse still, were they wise enough they would deserve our sympathy. 

It is closely the same position from which the world views victims of rape and other forms of abuse. I hope we all learn and keep in mind that bad things happen to people regardless of how good they are. Karma, if you believe in karma, is innocent in situations like this. So is God, the devil, the universe, and the numerous other justice granting systems you may subscribe to. 

When somebody suggested to me that masturbation might have led to my cancer, he wasn't speculating around for an actual cause or trying to come to some methodical conclusion for it. Even that would have been sensible. He was doing so because he considered masturbation wrong, whatever bad that befell me was a direct consequence of it. Just as the cause of cancer would be my eating meat if he were uninformed and also a vegetarian. 

I have never quite had the luxury of venting out on this matter as I would like to. With fanatics, it is hard to sustain the enthusiasm of an argument. The fanatics in particular who generalize everything under “what you sow is what you reap” or “if you believe enough, you can never be sick” at a time when a pandemic was overturning the world. 

In this book, you will find the poem "To Those Who Were Hurt Because God Was Teaching The World A Lesson". Again, the general essence of this book is to teach or evoke empathy as the first measure of humanity, as it should rightly be. Hopefully too it will get people to treat others as humans first before they consider what social group they fall into. 

I decided to leave out the class of people who accuse me of seeking attention, lying, overdoing my mark, or in social media terms, ‘clout chasing’ because these ones are on a whole new level of unsympathetic. Although, you would not readily blame them because of the way society has turned out to be. Desperation has forced people to do the unthinkable, claim the unimaginable and still have the guts to stand tall. 

These people are also the reasons I asked the above question: can a disease be a unique selling point?