News
Jane Fonda announces her illness, and gives us a New Life Lesson!
3 September 2022
Just a few days ago Jane Fonda, host of Good Morning America to promote Skydance’s animated film, Luck-in which she lends her voice to Babe The Lucky Dragon-was talking about luck, how important it is to accept misfortune in order to grow and learn from it, because that is how we become strong and can bring hope and joy to the world.
Jane Fonda at 84 is talking about hope, about the future, about the urgency of running for cover so that we can save this planet of ours, as the younger generations are asking us to do. At 84 – almost 85 – she does not stop being an active part of change. She always has, no one can deny it.
She wanted to announce to her 1.9 million followers on Instagram, in person, as she always does, a new challenge. A challenge that she is ready to face, with courage and awareness, and that she has chosen to make public in order to speak once again about rights, once again about inequality, once again about us all*. Jane Fonda has cancer, exactly a non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. She announces it in a few initial words of a very long post in which she mentions first of all her good fortune, because it is a cancer that has a high regression rate and because she has the opportunity to receive the best treatment-she has already started chemotherapy-thanks to her health insurance coverage. She is privileged, and her thoughts go out to all the American families who have faced cancer without being able to have the same good fortune as her, because health care in the United States is not a right, but a privilege of the few.
Jane, who has devoted her entire life to activism, and these last few years to the relentless fight against climate change-which has nothing to do with that greenwashing so fashionable especially among some of our local “artists”-goes on to talk about the causes of the disease-fossil fuels and pesticides-which we urgently need to eliminate.
She describes cancer as a teacher who is teaching her many things, starting with how important it is to take care of the community. She reassures us that the disease will not stop her activism, that she will continue the protests with all the resources she has to grow the community.
I read her words, direct and powerful, with tears in my eyes. Jane Fonda, at almost 85 years of age, is the biggest fan of the new generation who want a better world. And she fights along with them, she does so by putting her face, her resources, her desire for change. She could live peacefully the last – 100 is what I wish her – years of her life enjoying the fruits of one of the most extraordinary artistic careers in history. She could sit back and watch the world from her home, as do most of her contemporaries who cannot even hold a conversation with the young thinking it is wasted breath. He could give a damn about climate change, since he certainly won’t reap the benefits of the protests, having more life behind than ahead. She could shout at the young people blocking the streets and squares to go to work instead of wasting their time, as happened just in Italy some time ago. He could do like my neighbors, who can’t even throw away the glass without the plastic bags not giving a damn about the world of shit they are leaving to the children they have chosen to bring into the world – and who I hope will make them pay for it.
Jane Fonda chose to talk about hope, luck, the future, struggle, life, the world outside herself.
Thank you Jane, for all that you still give to this ramshackle world. Thank you for not leaving us alone, for never having done so.
