| Alex and Ben asked if it was possible to post old blog material from a few years back. It is possible so here you go. I’ll post a few I guess. |
Right this moment the government of Canada is trying to fulfill a campaign promise to enact legal suicide assistance. Not everyone believes that the idea is a good one. The Catholic church for example believes that the practice is a moral and social evil. That’s rich coming from the Catholic fucking church. Funny how getting hummers and butt fucking altar boys doesn’t qualify as a societal evil on the church scale of good and bad and yet we accept the hypocrisy by allowing value to their opinion. Each time the church lectures the flock on moral responsibility I’m gobsmacked by the balls and audacity of the religious in their persistence that they should set the bar for morality. It’s perplexing that they still act as if they have authority. I will allow that the church knows where the bar is considering how much time they and their representatives have spent ducking under it but seriously church people you need to shut the fuck up. Be a good boy and go sit in the corner and lick your nuts. You have some serious credibility issues so we’re going to let the elected and the courts figure this out.
Letting the religious determine moral guidelines is like allowing Paul Bernado to run the Canadian sex offenders registry. Neither are good idea’s and there’s a high probability they won’t follow the rules they preach.
Some representatives or spokespersons for the handicapped have stated that the sanction of a practice that measures the worth of a life could see us eventually evolve to where we whack everyone with a disability. I can sort of see what they mean but I thought we were talking about a terminally ill person seeking medical assistance to die. I guess I’m struggling with how we evolve from assisted suicide to euthanizing babies born with permanent defects.
The pivotal part of assisted suicide is the idea that the person wanting to check out is mentally competent to make that determination. I think that the choice to live or die needs a couple of things before it can work. The first is that the decision is personal. No outside agency can make the decision for you. The second has to be a good reason. The problem we seem to have is agreeing on which reasons are good ones.
The same issue in the United States has generated much the same discussion as is currently taking place in Canada. What makes the U.S. argument a little different than Canada’s is that some states of the Union already have an agency for a third party deciding if you live or die. They call it the death penalty though. I guess the whole idea behind an execution is that the whackee doesn’t want to be whacked so it’s different from a terminally ill person asking a doctor to put them to sleep. I guess that state sponsored killing is only acceptable if the person doesn’t want the help.
If I were a recruitment officer for ISIS and was looking for suicide bombers the first place I’d check out was the hospital. Specifically the cancer treatment part of that hospital. It’s kind of like low hanging fruit. Call me lazy but it seems that if you’re dying anyway then it might be easier to convince you to detonate yourself in a mall full of unbelievers. It’s got to take a lot of effort to talk a healthy person into becoming a martyr. Seems to me that if you’re toast anyway then why not see if the virgin story is bullshit or not? You really don’t have much to lose and who knows, maybe a god does exist that provides eternal rewards for mass murder.
But, I digress.
I was taking about being competent of mind and having an acceptable reason to medically and legally hasten one’s demise. I’ll assume that you need an incurable condition. I’ll assume that it hurts. I’ll assume that very soon you will be in a state where you require someone else to feed and clean you. I’ll assume the doctor agrees this will be your fate. So, what’s the problem?
The problem is a door that symbolically opens allowing the state through a panel of doctors to determine if a life can be morally terminated. It seems like a bit of a stretch to go from assisting the terminal to discriminately whacking the handicapped. I guess that a parent could eventually argue that a newborn with severe disabilities can never lead a life without pain and constant care. That their life will be agony and all parties would be best served with a baby whacking.
A circumstance like that does kind of open the door a little bit more. Next thing you know we’ve whacked so many midgets and cripples that the special Olympics got cancelled and we can never make another Lord Of The Rings sequel.
I’m not sure who would be on the whack list after that. DNA testing is readily available so I suppose we could hold every newborn in quarantine until the test results come back. Then after a review decide if they go home or to the warehouse. I think if we manage to get ourselves to a point where it’s ok to whack genetically challenged babies then we might as well go all in and build a warehouse to keep them in medical coma’s until we need parts other than stem cells.
Fuck morality……..the rich and powerful ought to be able to hang in for damn near two hundred years with regular maintenance thanks to the warehouse.
Maybe I’ve just described the door that opponents of suicide assistance fear will be opened, but it still seems a huge stretch to provide a person some control over their own death and end up with eugenics.
Maybe we should just say fuck it and get creative with assisting death. Maybe a person would choose to try heroin for the first time and then get zipped up in a body bag and dropped out of a helicopter onto the parking lot at the local Walmart. Maybe just the heroin though. I guess the whole idea of dying with dignity involves a bed, maybe a view and an I.V. and getting dropped from a helicopter is going to hurt and isn’t the most dignifying of departure choices. It’s fucking memorable though. People would be talking about it for years.