U.S. must affect global change, promote breast cancer awareness

A biting wind pierces my jacket as I jog from a low-hanging parking garage in downtown Fort Worth. It’s unusually cold for an April morning, and shoulder-to-shoulder clouds refuse to let any rays of sunshine penetrate their huddle. I stop for a moment, feeling a shooting pain in my side. My mom, dressed in her jogging suit and white baseball cap looks back at me with motherly annoyance.

“Come on, Jess. They’re about to start.”

I roll my eyes, and trudge down the police-blocked streets until we find our way through the pink-frosted crowd to the starting line for the Susan G. Komen Race for the Cure. I look around at the crowd of people huddled around me in their pink hats and scarves. They all look triumphant and peaceful at the same time. Everyone is freezing, but it somehow makes the crowd of joggers look more excited and accomplished.

Pop. And we’re off down the deserted streets toward the finish line. As we start to run, I look over at my mom. Her cheeks are red from the abrasive wind, but she doesn’t seem phased by it. She’s in her element. I’m sure I was complaining about the cold weather and that my feet hurt, but she somehow stayed optimistic, just like she had last fall when she was so sick.

This was her race. Even though she wasn’t one of the women who were wearing the survivor T-shirts, she had overcome illness just like they had.

Now, she was trying to keep that illness at bay just like the women around us.

Something changed that day. I understood those women, or at least what their families felt. I felt an overwhelming urge to want the rest of the world never to have to go through something like that.

And if the Western world can get its act together when it comes to issues like breast cancer awareness, maybe we can make that happen.

For instance, westernized habits have become increasingly harmful. Every night on the news is some new study about obesity and how it’s killing the world’s children. Those same bad habits make women and men (yes men are susceptible, too) to breast cancer.

According to an article in Time magazine, a study found that women who eat like westerners (red meats, breads, sweets) are 60 percent more likely to get the disease as women who eat more like easterners (beans, tofu, lean meats). It seems like not only will breast cancer become a more prominent disease in the future, but so will many other diseases linked to bad eating habits.

Not only has America and the rest of the Western world become too fat, they have also stopped exercising. And as more underdeveloped countries go from the fields to the office, fewer people are getting enough exercise.

“Research released in February by the University of Southern California showed that among a sample group of 110,599 people, women who engaged in strenuous activity five hours a week had, over the long term, a 20 percent lower risk of invasive breast cancer,” Kathleen Kingsbury said in her Time magazine article.

With so many of our bad habits influencing those overseas, other countries are now facing diseases like breast cancer in record numbers.

“Every three minutes an Egyptian woman is informed that she has the illness,” Kingsbury said.

And what makes that statistic even more devastating, is that in some countries women fear talking about having breast cancer or other diseases like it because they are afraid their husbands might leave them or their children won’t be chosen by suitable life mates.

It is up to the western world to help those other cultures understand diseases and set a good example with its own habits.

The recent Missions Emphasis Week on campus showed how powerful even one or two people can be in a foreign culture. Americans have the ability to affect global change. Why aren’t we doing that?