Welcome to the YOPA website and message board!
....The webmaster reserves the right to edit or delete any material, from any source.
A word from YOPA about a cure: please read the editorial below then click on the link to visit www.specterforthecure.com.
You may not subscribe to the notion that expediting cures is the federal government's role to play (even though the Constitution says "promote the general Welfare"). And with that quote, I do not wish this to become, in any fashion, a contest of words, or an argument of semantics, or a lesson for constitutional scholars. Rather, this is about life. Try to consider - without any strings attached - a moment. In that moment you have just heard the words (your loved one's name here) has (an 'incurable' disease here). And this reality check sends you plummeting, your thoughts racing... words like "pain" and "suffering" and "death" taking on stark new personal meanings, phrases like "an unfulfilled life" and "passed on too young" and "lost his or her battle with" burn sharp new images into your brain, as your feet search for the floor that keeps falling. And flashes of hope appear: aren't they working on some new drug? Didn’t they say a number of years ago, that in "five or ten years" stem cells could fix that? But reality answers back: “cure? A CURE? Seriously. They haven't cured anything since polio, back in the 50's…” Who is "they"? And more importantly, who you gonna call? Do you really want to wait until that particular moment to try and call a time out, to have a little chat with God? To wait until that clock starts ticking - inexorably - and very, very, quickly? And realize that, now that the clock IS ticking, the new standard in the quality of life department is "it sucks"? Well. If not our government - the one we have always quickly and loudly proclaimed, and very rightly so, to the rest of the world, is the BEST - then I don't know who. I know cures can't just be legislated; would that it was so easy! But if you have come on the ride this far, please stay with me a moment or two longer. Now that you are in need of a cure, aren’t you bothered that, with all the advances in science, the great leaps forward in technology, it has been over half a century since anyone can say they figured a medical puzzle out? Aren’t you frustrated that free market forces and a dash of governmental oversight have given us a paradigm where success is measured not by the number of diseases cured, but by how long the lives of people with “incurable” illnesses can be extended, regardless of how compromised they become? Are you not incredulous that millions and even billions of dollars, and years and even decades, have been spent with no apparent focus on delivering solutions? For whatever reason, the system as it exists just doesn’t translate research into medicine; it doesn’t create cures. No one can deny that hope, essential to a life worth living for all of us, shines as brightly, or more brightly, now in America than ever before. Let’s act on that hope - and help Arlen Specter point the way towards something really worthwhile: focusing the efforts for cures. Support the creation of the Cures Acceleration Network. All we have is now. Let's not wait. Everybody's clock is ticking.
