Politics & Power Quote by Lois Capps

There is a kind of soft power in declaring a month for a disease: it turns a slow-moving public health problem into a scheduled civic obligation. Lois Capps, a politician with deep ties to healthcare policy, frames National Osteoporosis Awareness and Prevention Month as both ritual and remedy, a May appointment for the nation to remember what it usually ignores. Osteoporosis is quiet, incremental, statistically feminine-coded, and easily crowded out by flashier crises. The quote’s insistence on “our Nation” is doing heavy lifting, widening a condition often dismissed as an individual aging issue into a collective responsibility.

The intent is straightforward: normalize education and prevention. But the subtext is legislative and budgetary. Awareness months are not only about pamphlets and screenings; they are a way to justify funding priorities, align agencies, and build a constituency for preventive care. Capps’s language of “become more familiar” avoids panic and blame, suggesting a public that is not negligent so much as under-informed. That’s politically useful: it invites participation without accusing voters of bad choices.

Her phrasing also folds prevention into patriotism. “Chance” and “we can take” cast health as attainable through reasonable steps, a rhetoric that flatters the listener’s agency while sidestepping the harder conversation about structural barriers: access to bone density testing, nutrition, safe spaces to exercise, and the economics of long-term care after fractures.

In context, this reads like a congressional proclamation engineered to make prevention sound like common sense, not ideology. It works because it treats attention as an intervention: if you can get a nation to look at a “silent disease” on purpose, you’ve already begun to change what gets counted, funded, and treated.