No Boundaries

I saw something that was very disheartening to me the other day. It was an organization that helps cure asthma in minorities. I too, have asthma, so this kind of hit home for me. Why just minorities? This is a chronic disease that affects all colors, all walks of life, all genders...So why just minorities, why not everyone?

Why not focus on curing asthma, period? People die from it every day. People, period. I don’t care if more purple people die from it than everyone else every day. “People” should be the focus of that sentence, and not “purple”. Asthma isn’t selective, why are we? We need to find a cure for asthma, period. We don’t need to exclude when it comes to things like this. It affects us as people – it doesn’t affect us as colors, genders, or income; it affects us as people. And frankly, I don’t care if you are even a cat with asthma, they need treatment too. Let’s try focusing on the real problem instead of separating ourselves. If we all came together and try to solve asthma, and just asthma, with no contingencies, we would have a greater success rate than if we tried to solve it separately. And I’d even be saying this if there were a “Reducing Sunburns in Redheads of America” group. Everyone gets sunburns, and everyone deserves to benefit from that research.

And asthma isn’t the only one that is broken down in groups like this; there are others – cancers, diabetes, etc. And sure, if it’s a disease that only occurs in one group because they are the only group that happens to have those parts, sure, focus on them (ex: Ovarian cancer in women or transgenders with female parts). Don’t be silly about it.

But we don’t need “Curing Diabetes for the Tall People of America” or “Liver Cancer Research for Purple People”. By dividing ourselves, we are not helping ourselves. Let’s seek to cure DIABETES, period. Let’s knock out CANCER, period. Let’s smother ASTHMA, period. No colors, no genders, no boundaries. These diseases don’t know any boundaries, so why do we make them for ourselves?