Here are some pertinent observations about the rising tide of Death for the Weak advocacy in the commanding heights of media. By Providence, the piece happened to run on the day Jack Kevorkian, a leading apostle of death (and an extremely creepy man) stopped thinking globally and started acting very locally.
Euthanasia is going to be pushed because it is in the interest of both state and corporation to do so. The quickest and easiest way for Caesar and Mammon to deal with the huge demographic bulge of aging Baby Boomers who will suck up resources and give less and less back as they get older is to murder them. So the same court prophets in media and the arts who have danced attendance on the murder of inconvenient and costly children for 40 years (and, of course, trained a new generation of Moloch worshipers to do likewise) will now do a repeat performance in order to persuade the young and economically powerful to slaughter their elders rather than inconvenience bean counters who can’t be bothered to pay for them. Look for a marked uptick in portrayals of the old as either pitiable wretches who just want to Go Home or “edgy” portrayals of the old as parasites who nobody will really miss (accompanied with encomiums to the artists who make such agitprop as bravely “saying what we are all thinking”). The point is, our culture of death—having already signed on in 1973 to the idea that costly and inconvenient people should be neatly, cleanly and privately murdered—will not hestitate to deal with its economic troubles in exactly the same way once the generation that embraced Roe wholeheartedly gets too old to change the Beatles CD.
And, by the way, this will be a bi-partisan effort. The Left will play the sentimental violin for the “They just want to Go Home” crowd of Oprahfied “compassionate” types, while the Randian Godless Conservatives will beat the martial drum for letting Nature Red in Tooth and Claw take its course and dispatch the Looters who want “entitlements” like food, air, water, shelter and love and who are sapping our economy with their parasitic whines begging not to be killed. The Left will plead for mercy killing and the Godless Randian Right will say “If the weak be like to die they had better do it and help decrease the surplus population. Why should Randian Creators subsidize aging worthless Looters?”
I think it’s about a 50/50 chance that I will die a natural death. It’s quite possible that by the time I’m 80 Caesar and Mammon will have created a system of complicated actuarial table which will figure out who is so great a burden on the state and economy that they must report to a Civic Euthanasia Center or face draconian penalties against their families.
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When I was a youngster I well remember hearing a strong sermon by the parish’s 30-ish assistant pastor well before 1973 when the earlist rumblings of legalizing abortion were being heard and next to nobody paid any attention, let alone mention the word. But like a prophet of old, he fearlessly said people had better fight against it then because, mark his words, once that was legalized the next move was to legalize euthanasia. He was saying this beofre most people knew or could pronouonce that word.
To be sure, the governing class that persuaded us to re-classify what had been a group of human beings in order to gain control of the underclass it created in the first place will have no trouble repeating the trick. I expect to see it in my lifetime. I think it is a scandal of the Church that the many (aging, NB) “justice and peace” activists have totally ignored the issue of intergenerational exploitation, and the (final) solution that will be implemented to fix it. When they take notice at all, they, like E.J. Dionne—AKA ‘Renfield’—just clap their hands over their ears and blather Democrat talking points until you go away.
I am not sure that we will see obligatory euthanasia in the near to mid future. The one check on this is that older people tend to vote at a much higher rate than younger people (Which is why any cut in Social Security and Medicare is unlikely in the near term); combine this with the size of the Baby Boom generation, and the legalization of mandatory euthanasia seems unlikely.
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What I do expect however is that euthanasia will become legal universally and the bar for requesting lowered from the now required terminal diagnosis to one based purely on “quality of life”. After that social pressure from family and friends will probably push many elderly towards Euthanasia that might have avoided it otherwise.
Mark Shea’s imagined “Randian” argument on euthanasia is completely false. And imagined is the word, because I know he has encountered no real-life Objectivist arguing such silly things. Real Objectivist argue that each individual owns his own life. A corollary is that he may choose to end his life. As with anything else one has a right to do, getting the voluntary assistance of others to do the same thing changes nothing.
Further, if a person finds himself (for example) in a state of chronic, excruciating pain with no hope of recovery, and wants to end his life and the misery it has become, only a sadist would demand that he be required to continue suffering.
For those interested in more commentary on euthanasia from an Objectivist perspective, I recommend Tom Bowden’s pieces on Jack Kevorkian.
http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=bowden+kevorkian
The economy will not recover because we have refused to stop killing preborn babies. When things get really bad in the not too distant future, euthanasia will be much more attractive. You can look for euthanasia mills popping up in major cities. The same kids who killed their babies with the encouragement of their parents will be taking mom or dad to be legally put to sleep because they are unwanted.
Don’t look for God to intervene. You reap what you sow.
I recently watched a Star Trek: The Next Generation Episode entitled “Half a Life” that dealt with a society on a planet whose star was slowly dying. As the plot unfolds we discover that the foremost scientist who is closest to solving the problem of “restarting” their sun, after a failed test on another star, has to return home to perform a ceremonial death rite on his 60th birthday. The entire society turned to forced euthanasia at the age of 60 in order to solve the problem of their elderly becoming too much of a burden and suffering old age beyond their “prime” years. In the end, the scientist ends up going back and killing himself (through a very beautiful ceremony of course) because otherwise his people would have rejected any work he did toward fixing their sun if he refused. What is left to the viewer is to decide whether they just sentenced themselves to death or not - after killing off their best chance of restarting their sun.
I don’t think it is unrealistic that at some point in our future, if we let things continue in the direction they are going, we’ll have mandatory euthanasia once we hit a certain age. Of course, it would be considered the most dignified and merciful thing to do. Anyone who tried to fight it and live beyond the chosen age would be considered a threat to our carefully ordered society.
@Mark Wickens
And how can it be argued that a man owns his own life? Did he give life to himself? I argue that unless you can answer that the man can bring himself into existence on his own, then his life does not belong to himself and he therefore has no right to choose to end it himself.
I can see a future where older people with diseases will be encouraged to die because Medicare won’t pay for a lot of things. It already is “pruning” down what it will pay for gradually, and private insurers are doing the same.
I don’t think there will be enough nursing homes or staff to fill them. And with the explosion of Alzheimer’s among the aging population and boomers, not enough caregivers will be around unless a cure is found, and that seems to be doubtful now.
I agree that the Church now needs to make some type of help available to seniors. I am one in very good health, but there are times weather permitting we can’t drive to church, or a loved one is ill and needs some companionship. I know there are some dioceses dealing with this, but more needs to be done.
If each diocese set up some type of volunteer program to the aged it would help, and seniors like me in good health could help older ones who aren’t and perhaps just need some companionship.
I do believe though that “compassionate euthanasia” will eventually come to pass, because life isn’t valued anymore since abortion is common in our country. Also, if people do not have the finances for long term care, or if no one is there to provide it, it may be that the elderly will feel there’s no choice but to die.
I hope this doesn’t happen, but unless we do something now, it will.
@rosemary kury,
you have it exactly right. Abortion is promoted in exactly such a manner (“No, there are no benefits to help you with your condition, brought about by your pregnancy ... except abortion). And they are certainly going to head in that direction with euthanasia (if they aren’t already there). “Pay for chemo? Oh, heavens, no! But we can give you an assisted suicide injection! Oh, golly won’t that be nice?”
Somehow alternative media including Catholic media need to find a a way to end the monopoly that the corporate-statist media have on the conversation, with their talking points and paradigms that come straight from the pit of Hell. We need to somehow elbow them out of the way so that we too are heard at the national and international level, rather than being forced to talk among ourselves in little cultural enclaves while those who congratulate themselves for being “aware” and “broad-minded” continue to set new benchmarks in ignorance and dogmatism.
This can be won back. It can be shouted down, but it will take WORK. it is not enough to ring the bell and go about your business, we have to engage the culture in discussion and put our faith in God. Crying, “All is lost.” is a copout of the worst order. Our kids deserve better.
As a nurse of 30 years who has cared for many elderly, especially hospice patients, I think the actual problem today is a lack of wisdom on the part of the elderly and their families to discuss death. Despite ardent church-goers who hear over-and-over again about eternal life, many elderly refuse to tell their families what their desire is in regard to end-of-life issues. They believe that if they don’t plan, everything will be OK. So you have very elderly people living the last months of their lives in ICU’s with virtually no hope of recovery (and yes, that does cost Medicare a LOT of money). Even in speaking with elderly who are not really understanding medical terminology, some who say “I want everything done to stay alive” will then tell you “But I don’t want tubes”. The last month of life costs Medicare more than the entire rest of a person’s life. But it is not just the money…families have ‘the living wake” around the person they love who is now a network of machinery. Nurses suffer in wondering why there was no conversation among family members before this happened. I am a nurse-educator and have taught the course “Death and Dying” for 14 years and I can tell you the pain of medical professionals who wonder how a person can become 60, 70 or 80 and not be concerned about how to prepare for death and eternal life. They think when Jesus said “you will live forever” that he meant here in this body on this earth in this lifetime. PLEASE talk about thses things. Have a Living Will, a health care advocate, and make sure it is legally documented. Maybe then in the futire, we could avoid having the government make the decision.
Sad, but just.
http://rau.3littlefoxes.com/?p=67
@ Mark Wickens:
“Further, if a person finds himself (for example) in a state of chronic, excruciating pain with no hope of recovery, and wants to end his life and the misery it has become, only a sadist would demand that he be required to continue suffering.”
It is our duty, first, to try to make sure they do not end up in this situation, and second, if they do, to ameliorate it—not to destroy suffering by destroying the sufferer. This is the cowardly and lazy way out of dealing with the problems that plague humanity, and will never yield actual solutions.
Reasons to be cheerful: there is much evidence that the fear of pain in this over-hyped scenario is out of proportion to the actual reality, and that once the fear and associated depression are treated compassionately the desire to live nearly always returns. Access to pain-control specialists is still inadequate; many don’t even know that this kind of help exists. This is what we should be striving to address. Many people need to know that excruciating pain or death do NOT have to be their only two options.
Having been a hospice nurse for 25 years, there are many types of pain that cannot be controlled. Compassion and hand-holding do not go far when someone is in excruciating pain despite using every drug in the arsenal.
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