by KRISTIAN GRAVENOR

If a tattooed nunchuk-toting skinhead in an orange jumpsuit busted down your door and beat you every day until one day you were dead, this would be a seriously heinous crime, wouldn't it?

Really, people would notice. The busty mamas at the park would be so distracted chatting about it they wouldn't notice their children demolishing each other's sandcastles. Nobody would show up at your funeral suggesting you died of natural causes. Cops would hunt for the killers, right?

And yet something as cruel and destructive takes the lives of masses of Canadians each year and nobody says much about it. We all just mainly yawn.

Cancer slowly murders the equivalent of half the population of Kingston, Ontario, every year. Half the city, not just Don Cherry. Cancer kills 68,000 Canadians every year and gets away with it because the culprits are small, evasive and sneaky.

Canada doles out $8-billion each year to its military. Yet foreign armies don't kill many Canadians at all. In fact, such invaders have killed approximately zero Canadians. In the States, they spend $400-billion (U.S.) a year on their military ($2.7-trillion over the next six years). Yet they also stand around as great swads of its citizenry get mowed down all the time by internal body invaders.

While not curing cancer, Americans and Israelis have recently teamed up to invent a handgun that can shoot people from around corners, so it's not a total waste.

Meanwhile, airport security checks luggage for bombs. But statistically they should be giving prostate exams, as cancer kills a Canadian every eight minutes. We're taking a tough stand against non-existent aircraft bombers but we're flying the white flag at these real mass murderers. We're sheepish about it because we're too dumb to know how to fight back against the microscopic murderers.

But even if a tiny fraction of the cash we spend on crap was spent on this real war, we could equip armies of our greatest minds with lab smocks and Bunsen burners and send them to the front lines of humanity's greatest battle.

And I'm not going to even discuss the other debilitating medical problems - heart disease, psychosis, hair loss - that Canadian researchers might have a better chance to beat if they were hooked up with military-style budgets.

Disease is the cruellest killer the world has known: it murders children, saints, sexy babes and sweethearts. Next time you're on a metro car or a movie, count 20 people. Cancer will eventually invade eight of them and successfully murder five.

The locally based Cancer Research Society, one of a hodgepodge of Canadian anti-cancer groups, receives no government cash and raises $11-million a year to figure out how to beat the disease. It's way too little. Cripes, some professional athletes make twice that in a single year.

"Canada doesn't spend enough money or have enough people working on cancer research," says Mario Chevrette, president of the CRS. "Even those who survive cancer end up seriously traumatized by it. I think most Canadians feel more anxiety over the concept of cancer than over questions of national defence"

Chevrette says that finding cures for cancers would be a big cash saver too, as we spend loads on caring for these people - 100 times as much as gets spent on prevention.

He also believes that healthy living could prevent 30 to 50 per cent of cancer cases, assuming that the boredom of clean living doesn't kill them. And the cynical notion that the researchers are really a self-serving medical mafia that keeps the cash rolling in by not finding the cure is just a bit stupid. McGill's recent breakthroughs in breast cancer research and Novartis' Gleevac, an anti-leukaemia juice, are among impressive recent breakthroughs.

Cancer and other diseases are ripping through our population like a gang of ebola through a tuna sandwich. It's time to redirect the big guns away from the non-existent human enemies and onto the little bugs that are feasting on us like there's no freakin' tomorrow.

Comments? kgravy@openface.ca