Even though the campaign’s strategy of eliciting curiosity and subsequently revealing its purpose does the job it sets out to do, I wonder why the awareness aspect of breast cancer is getting more than its share of our attention when so much needs to be done to fight the disease. These campaigns are undoubtedly created with the genuine intention of helping the cause, but we need to take an honest look at how far we really reach with a tongue-in-cheek Facebook status, so that we can address the hard reality of what actually needs to be done.
Current statistics say that one in eight women will be diagnosed with breast cancer. However, it has a very good prognosis when caught early, with a 93 percent five-year survival for stage zero cancer, and 88 percent for stage one, according to the American Cancer Society. The high overall survival rate compared to other forms of cancer is in part thanks to the efforts of people who truly wanted to increase awareness when breast cancer wasn’t as well known and who encouraged women to get screened. Their work proves that awareness is important, but we’ve passed the point at which awareness is a major stumbling block in treatment.
There’s a bit of a disconnect between how much we — myself included — talk about wanting to help with some problem in society and how many of us actually do something. This may be in part because it’s hard to look at a problem’s full magnitude without getting discouraged, so we simplify it to feel like we can do more about it.
This phenomenon isn’t limited to breast cancer. The hope that our little actions are all it takes to save the world can also extend to our attitudes toward service in general. During Mathey College’s week of service my sophomore year, I decided to sign up to help at an afterschool program at a Catholic school in Trenton. My group helped take care of the kids after school until their parents could come pick them up, and nearly every child had one or two Princeton volunteers hovering over them, smothering them with attention. I felt like my presence was unnecessary, and our service generally ineffective.
I got into the car feeling like I had done absolutely nothing, but as soon as we hit the road the other volunteers started gushing about the experience. They were giddy with joy at being able to help a struggling third grader with multiplication and at being able to play presidential bingo with a black president on it in this predominantly black group of children. While one-on-one help is an important part of addressing our country’s issues with education, I didn’t share in their enthusiasm. When I voiced my concern that many of the kids couldn’t read well enough to figure out the tough president names in our bingo game, I was met with cold stares. I felt like the child in “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” only in this version of the story the townspeople were naked too, and they were offended that I would suggest that anything was wrong.
Any cause, from poverty to cancer, needs people on the front lines working to help those in need right now, but the people working to make those services obsolete by looking at the root of the problem are essential. We obviously have limited power and resources at our age, but we need to be wary of settling into faddish activism. Whether you donate a dollar to the Susan G. Komen Foundation or study to become the researcher who finds the cure for cancer, whether you tutor one little kid or end up rewriting education policy for the federal government to give everyone a better foundation, you are part of — but not all of — the solution. We shouldn’t let the breadth of a problem discourage us from facing it, nor should we expect to solve it singlehandedly.
In order for things like the purse campaign to really have an impact, we need to realize that our purses are only effective if we do more than just include them in a cheeky Facebook status. We should reach into them and open our wallets and donate to research or take out a pen, pencil or highlighter and learn something here that we might be able to use to change the future.
Sophia LeMaire is a mechanical engineering major from Longmeadow, Mass. She can be reached at slemaire@princeton.edu.
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