David McElroy

It was a year ago today that I saw a doctor for the first time about what I was to discover was breast cancer.

I had been feeling a small lump for a couple of weeks and I finally decided — on New Year’s Eve — to call a doctor friend and go over to his house for advice. He took a look and told me that it could be benign, but there was a good chance it was cancer. He gave me advice about who to see.

Then we sat on his porch next to some woods and watched the last sunset of the year through the trees. (That’s a picture I took at the time.) It’s hard to believe that’s been a year.

The end of a year and the beginning of another one almost always leads to reflection. For me — this year in particular — it leads to questions about what I’ve learned and whether I’ve “spent” the year wisely. I certainly didn’t have any control over the way the year started. I didn’t have any control over the uncertainty that came from the diagnosis of breast cancer and the surgery to remove it. But I’m not sure how well I handled the rest of the year. I’m not sure I’m any better off than I was as I sat on my friend’s porch in the late afternoon a year ago.

Up until that lump showed up, I had big plans for 2012. When you find out you have cancer, plans go out the window. Uncertainty creeps into everything. That’s understandable, but I think I let that overshadow everything else. I don’t think I ever got to the place of saying, “Hey, that was scary, but it’s over. I can go back to what I’d planned.”

I think that my fear — and especially the fear of what it felt like to go through the crisis alone — threw me into a tailspin that’s taken longer to recover from than I realized. In some undefined way, I was waiting for someone to rescue me, I think. It’s hard to accept that nobody’s going to rescue me. I just have to deal with life — and with life-threatening crises — alone.

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Ben Stone was gracious enough to ask me to chat with him for Thursday’s episode of the Bad Quaker podcast. You can listen to it here if you can stand an hour of me. He and I talked for an hour about subjects ranging from partisan politics and anarchy to entertainment and whether the country is heading toward collapse.

And if you’re wondering what a “bad Quaker” is, here’s an explanation.

What was the key to changing Americans’ attitudes toward race relations in the ’70s? Some would argue that it was political activism or congressional action or even street protests. I’d say that “All in the Family” was more important than any of those.

Do you remember “All in the Family”? If you lived through the ’70s, you probably saw it as a first-run sitcom. If you came along after that, you probably saw some episodes in syndication. After a shaky start — on a network with no real expectations for it — “All in the Family” took off to become the monster sitcom hit of the ’70s, with a long period during which it was No. 1 rated.

The show was about a lovable bigot and his family — his dim-witted wife who sometimes had the biggest heart and best insights, their ultra-liberal daughter and her even more liberal new husband. It might sound like a typical sitcom family, but the subjects were anything but typical. It confronted racial issues and bigotry (among other social issues) in a very up-front way.

The show was a success because it was funny. It was well-written and well-acted. It felt as though its biggest mission was to entertain, not to preach. And that is why it worked better than all the preaching in the world.

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