“So sick of this stupid column, and that avatar needs bigger tits”.

Isn’t this the very first comment you made when this piece first hit the Herald?

Now you claim to “believe this to be soft-core porn, which I don’t think belongs in a general interest publication”.

To add insult to injury, you go on the speak for my aunt who you don’t know, as if you actually know what you are speaking about. Since I did have the pure pleasure of knowing her, I think I can reasonably believe this is what she would say.

“Baby, there are people in this world who are so unhappy with themselves, that they are incapable of sharing joy with others, because they have no joy for themselves”.

She would also go on to say, “Sometimes you have to call a bully’s bluff”… so I challenge you this.

Contact me in-world and we can make arrangements to meet in “real life”. I will gladly have dinner with you, and even pickup the check. You can sit across from me, share a meal and tell me the grievances you have with my choices. I have TONS of frequent flyer’s miles so getting to where you are should not be a problem.

Afterwards, I can show you pictures and video on my laptop that perhaps will give you insight into my aunt’s life.

I resisted the urge to comment before because I felt it would only lessen the original point of me becoming a Post 6 Grrrl. However, since you have decided to comment TWICE about my aunt, I feel the strong need to issue this challenge.

I am fully prepared to meet with you, but I can’t help to believe you will ever rise to this challenge. The veil of anonymity makes cowards brave.

I knew from the beginning that opening my personal 1st life on this page was risky, and fully expected some of the comments made. The true purpose of this piece, is to raise awareness of Relay for Life, and the hope that some will be moved to give of their lindens/time/talents for this cause.

To Artemis Fate, I still believe 60% of something, is far better than 100% of nothing. ACS may or may not be the best of charities, but I am inspired by the efforts of the SL residents that have decided to embrace this cause. At a time when SL is portrayed as a den of sex, gambling & violent role-play (see April issue of GQ Magazine), it is refreshing to see that there is SOME effort to do good works. I have become a big fan of SL and want the positive actions that take place in SL to perhaps one day shine brighter than the negative ones.

I am fully prepared to help you in any way I can to raise awareness in the charity drive you create. The same way I support Callie Cline’s efforts to raise money for the victim’s families and the Virginia Tech community.

I would like to share a short story that I have taken close to my heart.

A young boy is walking along the beach in the early morning hours. The beach is filled with starfishes that have washed on shore after a storm from the night before. He notices
a woman tossing starfishes back into the ocean. He asks her what is she doing, and the woman replies “I am tossing these starfishes back into the ocean before the sun become too hot and kills them”. The young boy looks around to see thousands of starfishes and questions “there are too many, you can’t save them, there is not enough time, what does it matter”? The woman stoops down picks up another starfish, shows it to the young boy and replies “it matters to THIS one”.

Cancer research HAS advanced over the recent years. Had my aunt lived 6 years later, she would have enjoyed far better treatment, better quality of life and a far better chance of surviving. In medical schools all over the world, there are aspiring doctors who’s main purpose is to dedicate their talents to providing relief, better treatments and perhaps a cure to cancer patients.

I am looking forward to working with you.

I, in no way want this rebuttal to take away from the ultimate goal, and that is to raise awareness for RFL. Thanks to all that have made comments of support and thanks to Marilyn Murphy, Jaime Wheeler and the others at the Herald that have allowed me to use this platform.

Why try to make her feel like crap for doing something she enjoyed? Or better still, why even read an article that you already trivialize as being for nothing more than “wanking pleasure?”

“Preventcancer.com could be a marvelous organization but they could also be a couple of con artists who also run preventscurvy.com and hot_co-eds.com. With the ACS I’m dealing with a known entity.”

And ACS could be a wonderful society that, even though it skims off a hefty porportion for it’s CEOs, earnestly tries to treat cancer, or it could be a bunch of corporate con artists that, pushed by pharmaceutical, radiological, and chemical multi-million dollar donors, opt for more dangerous but more profitable research in curing cancer that utilize methods that directly profit these heavy donors.

Ultimately, i’m suspicious of all multi-billion dollar corporations that deal in medicines, especially ones that’s ultimate goal is completely eliminating a certain disease. Because, in other words, what that goal would be is to put yourself out of business. Now, take that concept, and stick a bunch of corporate tyrants on the head who have become so psychologically disconnected from what they’re dealing with that they can’t help but see things simply as numbers (as with any hierarchical system that has too many links between the bottom and the top, a CEO could fire 50 people for a 3 cent quarterly profit because they’re no longer people, just numbers.), and then include big-money developmental corporations that say “we want cancer patients to be treated with Chemotherapy, oh and here’s a million dollars for your nice organization *wink wink*”, and honestly that spells trouble for me.

Yes, 600 dollars to cancer (even not saying that their research is more directed to benefit corporations than the best way to save lives) is nice, but 954 out of 1000 dollars (national cancer coalition, for example’s, percentage) would be better for a non-profit organization don’t you think? Especially to think that there is that 40 percent chance that if I donated a hefty individual amount to RFL, that not one CENT of it, would actually benefit cancer research in any way shape or form.

I went and read the materials you cited and though generally I agree that the big players in the charity game could spend a little more time with the credo “charity begins at home” and less time on the corporate jet, I stand by my support of Relay for Life, Pink Ribbons and the American Cancer Society.

The two NYT articles you cited are pretty thin evidence that the ACS is corrupt, especially as one of them was over twenty years ago and both cases involved individuals, not a problem with the organization as a whole. The Better Business Bureau approves them, but doesn’t approve preventcancer.com…

I read the preventcancer.com website and was not impressed. It hasn’t been updated in two months and has very little information on it other than a plethora of info about milk, much of which has been in the “cancer news” since I was a student in Europe when Chernobyl happened twenty years ago. Preventcancer.com could be a marvelous organization but they could also be a couple of con artists who also run preventscurvy.com and hot_co-eds.com. With the ACS I’m dealing with a known entity.

My real point about ACS is that if you’re fighting for your life, or helping a friend or relative through their battle, you want to feel like you’re not alone, not powerless. ACS is such a huge presence, and their ubiquitous pink ribbon programs and other efforts like relay for life give people hope and an easy access to something to empower them through a frightening time. I’d much rather give them my thousand dollars, even knowing that only 600 of it might end up as research dollars, as long as the organization is out there giving people hope and power. A well-run organization is expensive. Think about experiences you’ve had with well-run companies versus slap-dash ones. If you want a professional to do a good job you’re going to have to pay for it, don’t be naive.

preventcancer.com might put all of my money directly into the hands of a scientist, but I think that ACS getting 800 high school kids to walk around a track all night is a much more positive contribution in the end, because they will help get the word out, help bring in more money, and learn that it genuinely does feel good to do good.

Seriously Artemis, Relay for Life is coming up.. get involved and join us, bring a friend, bring your family. You’ll be glad you did.

Thanks for reading,
Jaime

http://www.preventcancer.com/losing/acs.htm

http://www.disinfo.com/archive/pages/dossier/id336/pg1/index.html

I don’t think it’s necessarily “making fun of” to point out with sources backing it up that the American Cancer Society dedicates a rather exorbitantly large amount of their profits to paying the board (The CEO gets paid 700+K a year after all), and that they have a long history of embezzlement and fraud ( http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?sec=health&res=990CEFD7163EF932A25755C0A9669C8B63&n=Top%2fReference%2fTimes%20Topics%2fOrganizations%2fA%2fAmerican%20Cancer%20Society and http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?sec=health&res=9504E6D9153BF93AA25751C1A963948260 ) with those funds that AREN’T dedicated to making rich guys more rich.

Not to mention that despite that cancer funding (based on how much these “non-profit” organizations are taking in) is at a high, cancer rates have not been declining nor do we seem to be any closer to a cure. Another site, The Cancer Prevention Coalition, called for a boycott on ACS because, as the Chronicle of Philanthropy put it “more interested in accumulating wealth than saving lives”. Which, all this makes their massive spending on advertising even worse, since it seems like that advertising spending is more about getting them rich than preventing cancer. Another site stated that “Only about 16% goes directly into programs for cancer patients, the rest into bureaucratic overhead and expensive drug research.”

So please, don’t marginalize these statements down to “making fun of”, this is a clear problem, and even if SOME of that money is staying out of the mortgage for the CEO’s 2nd mansion, i’d say it’d be much better if most if not ALL of this extremely profitable non-profit organization could go to the purpose that they spend so much of that advertising money claiming they’re doing.