Demographitti

FACT: Women aged 39 and under have a higher probability of developing melanoma than any other cancer except breast cancer.

Nonprofit organizations like the Skin Cancer Foundation have been doing a great job of late in trying to spread the “inconvenient truths” about the alarming increase in the incidence of melanoma among young women, which is largely attributable to tanning bed use among teenagers and twenty-somethings. But I almost never see any mention of melanoma’s impact on a demographic group that’s also near and dear to my heart, boomers, and it’s making me just a little bit paranoid. Is there a message in this silence? I mean, I know my g-g-g-g-generation is a ticking federal deficit time bomb, given the unfunded promises that Social Security and Medicare will be there for us in our golden years, and there are some who wish we’d just go away. So is the message that boomers are expendable soldiers in the war on melanoma, with a patriotic fiscal duty to succumb before reaching age 65?

Yikes. Suck it up, kids, I’m not going down without a fight and I’m not gonna die before I get old! And, meanwhile, I’m not gonna stop nagging you about avoiding the mistakes I’ve made. So there.

I’ll end this rant with a new twist on Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young’s “Teach Your Children”…



You, who are on C’s road must have a code that you can live by.
And so become yourself because the past is just a goodbye.
Teach your children well, their father's hell is where the moles lie,
And feed them all your ‘screen, not one they’d pick, the one your docs buy.
Don't you ever let them fry, if they scold you let it lie,
So just care for them and sigh and know they love you.

And you, of the tender years can't know the fears that your elders blew by,
And so please lend them both your ears, they speak the truth before they can die.
Teach what parents tell, their children's hell is where the moles lie,
And heed them when they scream, the bone they pick, the tales they’ve told twice.
Don't you ever ask them why, if they told you, you would cry,
So just care for them and sigh and know they love you.