Monday, April 04, 2005
Blogburst for Terri: The Unborn, The Disabled, Now the Elderly Are Next
Being a Christian libertarian, I think sometimes Vox Day rushes in where angels fear to tread, but this article in WorldNetDaily is the most lucid description of the what lies behind Terri Schiavo's judicial homocide:
This is not a Democrat or Republican thing – many of the pro-starvation judges have been Republican appointees – it is a demographic thing. Already, the elderly soak up a staggering amount of national resources, as the blessings of technology allow them to live longer while turning them into wrinkled chemical cyborgs. This would be unobjectionable to anyone, except for the fact that the elderly are not paying for most of the expense of their much-needed medical treatments, and they are collecting Social Security for many more years than anyone previously envisioned.
The move to health maintenance organizations 20 years ago essentially sealed the doom of the elderly. It is already a well-established fact that when the health of an individual is at odds with the profitability of these government-mandated corporations, the individual is out of luck. This trade-off, writ large, serves as an example of what we can expect to see over the next 30 years when the "right to die" will become the "responsibility to die" and quality of life becomes a legal question to be determined by Department of Health bureaucrats instead of a pallid excuse to justify high taxes in certain locales.
It won't happen overnight. Schiavo simply represents the first nibbling about the margins. But soon will come the Fox News debates about the terminally ill and the mentally disabled – if an Alzheimer's patient can't even recognize his own daughter, is he really there anymore? It's customary to dismiss slippery slopes as a false form of hypothesis, but when there's both historical and international models that are obviously being followed, we're no longer talking about possibilities, we're looking at time frames.
Vox Day is to be commmended for telling it like it is from the perspective of the Christian faith:
And eventually they'll get around to the cripples and the Jews. This is an inspired evil that stems from a supernatural source whose inhuman goals are always the same: death, division and destruction. If you don't see how these things connect, recall that it was Jesus Christ who said: "I tell you the truth, whatever you did not do for one of the least of these, you did not do for me."
Those who call themselves Christians have to stop ignoring the spiritual aspect of what happened to Terri. I've been chided for comparing Terri's death to the Holocaust, and perhaps there is merit to this criticism, but one clear parallel is that like the Holocaust the primary impulse for the euthanasia movement is not merely a human evil, but a supernatural one. And at times it will only be this belief that will allow us to resist the cynical secular algebra that seeks to factor the unborn, disabled and elderly out of the post-modern equation of worth.
This is not a Democrat or Republican thing – many of the pro-starvation judges have been Republican appointees – it is a demographic thing. Already, the elderly soak up a staggering amount of national resources, as the blessings of technology allow them to live longer while turning them into wrinkled chemical cyborgs. This would be unobjectionable to anyone, except for the fact that the elderly are not paying for most of the expense of their much-needed medical treatments, and they are collecting Social Security for many more years than anyone previously envisioned.
The move to health maintenance organizations 20 years ago essentially sealed the doom of the elderly. It is already a well-established fact that when the health of an individual is at odds with the profitability of these government-mandated corporations, the individual is out of luck. This trade-off, writ large, serves as an example of what we can expect to see over the next 30 years when the "right to die" will become the "responsibility to die" and quality of life becomes a legal question to be determined by Department of Health bureaucrats instead of a pallid excuse to justify high taxes in certain locales.
It won't happen overnight. Schiavo simply represents the first nibbling about the margins. But soon will come the Fox News debates about the terminally ill and the mentally disabled – if an Alzheimer's patient can't even recognize his own daughter, is he really there anymore? It's customary to dismiss slippery slopes as a false form of hypothesis, but when there's both historical and international models that are obviously being followed, we're no longer talking about possibilities, we're looking at time frames.
Vox Day is to be commmended for telling it like it is from the perspective of the Christian faith:
And eventually they'll get around to the cripples and the Jews. This is an inspired evil that stems from a supernatural source whose inhuman goals are always the same: death, division and destruction. If you don't see how these things connect, recall that it was Jesus Christ who said: "I tell you the truth, whatever you did not do for one of the least of these, you did not do for me."
Those who call themselves Christians have to stop ignoring the spiritual aspect of what happened to Terri. I've been chided for comparing Terri's death to the Holocaust, and perhaps there is merit to this criticism, but one clear parallel is that like the Holocaust the primary impulse for the euthanasia movement is not merely a human evil, but a supernatural one. And at times it will only be this belief that will allow us to resist the cynical secular algebra that seeks to factor the unborn, disabled and elderly out of the post-modern equation of worth.
papijoe 6:33 AM
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