Why Do We Do This?

We're reading "Will the Circle Be UnBroken?" by Studs Terkel in the ecumenical book group that I lead at church. It's a book full of interviews about death and dying.

This week's section had an interview that was very focused on the movement to bring cancer out of the closet. It's hard to remember at this point, but there was a time not so long ago when people didn't talk about cancer because of the stigma attached to it. There was, strangely, a sense that someone people who got cancer got it because of something they did wrong, that it was their own sorry fault.

I have never had cancer, and amazingly, have never experienced anyone in my immediate family having a hard core cancer struggle. But I deal with it a lot at church, and I definitely have the sense that shame is not part of the cancer experience anymore. There is still some sense of fault attached to lung cancer, for people who smoked/smoke, but other than that, we're over that bizarre cultural phenomenon of blaming the victim for cancer. But only because a lot of people got involved in fighting to make that happen.

What I don't get is why it happened in the first place. And why it seems like we do that with every disease. Why is it that as new diseases are first discovered, our first impulse is to blame the victim or the victim's parents? Am I right that people blamed autism on mothers? Certainly, the AIDS epidemic didn't reveal our most compassionate tendencies. We blame ADHD on television. I'm sure some of you can list other examples. Did it happen with polio? MS? CP?

Why is it that our first tendencies are guilty until proven innocent when it comes to disease? I'm guessing it's because such a construct helps us feel like there is something we can do, something we can control that will mean we won't be struck with the same disease. Ah, the pleasant delusions of control! Why do they have to have such a high price?