Blogging it forward

I am not really one of those people who support charitable causes. Mostly because I am always broke, but I digress.

In Russia, a young blogger named Anton Buslov has cancer for which he cannot afford treatment. From the Yahoo! News article I read and his Give Forward site, I feel like he's a good guy and, if he lives, will continue to contribute to society in above-average ways - he's smart, for one thing.

Another reason I want to support his campaign, if only by blogging about it, is his stance that it's better to fight his disease with good instead of using the method lionized by the TV series Breaking Bad, which uses cancer to justify criminal enterprise and violence. The show disgusts me on a visceral level, because it is entirely possible that people will use it to excuse bad behavior...and I'm not talking about parking in the handicapped zone without a sticker here, okay? But real, violent, anti-social behavior because they're ill.

Well, you can't fight Hollywood, but Buslov is doing a great thing by getting it out there that a grim cancer diagnosis does not need to make someone a monster.

If you have a mind to, please at least read his story. With a lot of luck and less bad in the world, he may get the treatment he needs to live.