It astonishes me – the casualness, the callousness, the stupid matter-of-factness with which people can discuss euthanasia. People discuss putting their family members to sleep with only slightly more gravity than putting a pet to sleep. Why is abortion given a greater level of discretion in conversation than “pulling the plug”? Because starving someone to death and taking them off life support is considered a more humane way to kill them than vacuuming off their limbs and crushing their skull?
Let it be known that I don’t want anyone deciding when it’s time for me to die. I’ll fight to the last moment, thank you. And the same goes for my family. There’s all kinds of pious crap put out by religious fanatics (and they are fanatics, when we’re talking about neglect and murder) — all kinds of garbage about not using extraordinary means to save us. Who decides what’s extraordinary? The world? By this logic, why use CPR on a drowning victim? It may be their time, right? I hate this with my whole heart. I will fight to the end, I will sustain my family with everything in me, and I will not set an example of pushing myself out on an ice flow so as not to be a burden. That’s the culture of savages, not of Christ. People are not burdens, they’re not expendable, and they’re not ‘in the way’.
In fact, when I hear the words of Christians justifying the Culture of Convenience, the Culture of “Don’t get in my way” (to borrow from Franky Schaeffer), of “Don’t burden me”, I breathe and spit. This is the Enemy we’ve known from of old, and it has infected the minds of the faithful with the silky foulness of the demonic.
It’s worse, of course, to kill someone or abandon them or neglect them to death than to talk about killing them. But the fact that there’s no shame, that’s it’s considered a normal part of polite conversation makes me want to vomit. And I’m supposed to express condolences at their loss? That kind of “sensitivity” is the same kind that would congratulate someone for fornicating, because they’re now in a meaningful relationship.
Human life is an absolute value. I really hate this culture, its transvaluation of ethics, and all it represents. Most of all, it represents a culture of sacrifice, as Rand pointed out. A culture of expending some for the sake of others. You see it in our resource wars, in the way we drive on the freeway, and in the institutionalization of medical care not as a saving charity but as a kind of semi-benign curse. After all, we’re the only country of this level of wealth where you can go bankrupt from receiving medical care, and die when the last pennies run out. Every other society with this much money, considers that barbaric. Here, we figure the laws of the market outweigh the cost of sustaining your existence.
Scorn, derision, excrement upon this culture.
My Grandma suffered a stroke 3 years ago, and her living will stated that she wasn’t to have a feeding tube, etc., done for her. So she died. That bothers me. She had just left her home of almost all of her life to live in a small condo she could “keep up with” and I think it killed her. I also think she didn’t want to live any more. My Grandpa died several years ago, as did my dad (her oldest son, and also her favorite). She didn’t like her new house, and I don’t think she adjusted to it at all.
It has really made me think — how much is “too much”? I read a story not too long ago of a man who was declared brain-dead, and his organs were about to be harvested, when his cousins (who were nurses) noticed he didn’t seem brain dead, and brought his reflexes to the attention of the doctors. He has a few problems (some short-term memory loss, mostly), but he’s doing fine. Where do we draw the line?
Thanks for your thought-provoking post. To live is Christ; to die is gain.
Kathy
Back in the blogosphere, and I thought I would catch up on your blog. Wow. Definitely going where most would fear to tread.
I think that we are in a difficult place here. What is death? I haven’t yet figured out what I would do, because it is so difficult (although I lean towards the extraordinary measures side of the debate).
You excoriate those who pull the plug, as well as those who want to avoid “extraordinary measures”. The problem is that we have the ability to keep people’s organs functioning long after their brains have ceased to function (ie. where a person normally would have died), and so the fact of the technology results in a case where we must either refuse the technology (“extraordinary measures”) beforehand or rely on someone else to decide when to pull the plug.
I have lost three grandparents. I am not sure about the third, but in the case of the first two someone decided to “pull the plug” after it was concluded that grandparent X was no longer with us.
I could not live with the burden of knowing that I decided that it was another person’s time to die, or that that person had already died. And I do not want to place that burden on another. So I pray for a simple death, where these kinds of situations do not come in. Failing that … as I said, I lean towards no extraordinary measures.
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Of course, euthanasia where it is a matter of deciding that another is in too much pain, etc., I do not regard as a matter for debate. The Schiavo case was outrageous in its blatant evil. That kind of “pulling the plug” does not engage the conflict that I identify above – ie., what is death, and how do we know that a person is dead?
I think I rambled.
Thanks for the post.
– V.
Ignore the smiley face. It was supposed to be standard punctuation.
– V.