Posts Written By L Parker Brown

Did you see red today?  Americans nationwide wore red this Friday to show their support for women’s heart disease awareness. In the United States, National Wear Red Day (NWRD) occurs each year on the first Friday in February. The observance provides an opportunity for everyone to unite in the life-saving movement to draw attention to heart disease. Heart health consciousness is not just a wakeup call for Baby Boomers, nor is it exclusively a man’s disease as some people believe.

Heart disease is the number one health threat to women. The illness develops gradually and starts to rise when women are between the ages of 40 and 60, and it disproportionately affects women of color – African-American and Hispanic women – who have high rates of major risk factors. 

I first became aware of NWRD several years ago, at a former workplace, when about mid-week a savvy co-worker/friend began encouraging the women in the office to wear red on the following Friday to draw attention to heart disease. At the time, some of us, myself included, had not even heard of NWRD, probably because the movement then was only a few years old. Always on a mission to support a worthwhile cause, my friend, Lori, provided the wake-up call to our staff, drawing our attention to this very important issue which some of us still endorse.    

 All this week on The View, Barbara Walters and her co-hosts have been promoting The Barbara Walters Special:  A Matter of Life and Death which spotlights the need for heart health awareness. The program airs at 10PM tonight on ABC television.

How many people do you know to whom you can tell a secret and know that it will never be told? Some people don’t believe that there is a single soul who can not tell a secret. Benjamin Franklin may have been one of the skeptics when he wrote in Poor Richard’s Almanac “Three people can keep a secret if two of them are dead.”  

I don’t need to tell you that there are many and various reasons why people keep secrets. Do I?  Consider this, if someone tells you a secret about someone else, it is more likely gossip and the person sharing the confidential information is merely – and eagerly – engaging in a crafty variation of The Telephone Game, frequently referred to as the “Pass-It-On” game.  Because people love to talk about other people’s lives, the person who originally tells you the secret, for added drama may say, “I am only telling this to you. If I hear it again, I will know who it came from.” That veiled threat is to hold you to confidence, so that the spiller of the secret can continue to tell it to others – before you do.  

However, if the secret is about the person who shared it with you, then she obviously expects (while crossing her fingers and toes) that you will keep her secret. Would you? A woman may want to share her secret only with her closet friend, perhaps because she feels the need to discuss it with someone who she believes she can trust to keep it to herself. But we know human nature, and regardless of whether it sounds sexist for me to say what I am about to say I’m saying it – I believe that men keep secrets better than women.  A woman HAS to tell someone.  After all, what is the point of having a secret if you can’t share? It’s okay, you can agree. Even if a woman shares her personal secret with her best friend, chances are nine to one that her best friend will tell her best friend who will tell someone else and before you can say, “Breaking News” the secret is public knowledge. So the bearer of the secret conceals it like a winning poker hand. Maybe one day she will decide to reveal her secret, but even if she does not, hopefully she will not have killed two other people in order to keep it.