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well, hospitals do this every day. the device is called a morphine drip. it sends people out on a cloud. the decisions to do this are generally taken by families. i haven't had the mixed fortune to make any such decisions myself, but i've been party to them and know many families who have had to make it, including my own.
i think people are afraid of death. they don't want to confront it, they don't want to think about it, they don't want to be reminded that it is a reality. so they prefer to avoid it and to console themselves with thoughts of some technological apparatus that will enable them to avoid it. everyone is of course the exception. everyone thinks there is a way out for them. in that, everyone's particular dream is the same as everyone else's.
and i do not know how one goes about weighing one thing against another in making such a decision, that of ending the life of another, particular someone you love. pain against continuing? the threshold past which there is no hope, only a waiting? the wishes of the individual involved?
it seems this whole "debate" is really about a collective fear of dying. given that alot of conservative politics center on a paranoid fear of the state which is in many cases maybe reasonable and in many cases not so much, it makes sense to see this matter framed as yet another instance in which the Bad Persecuting State wants to Off the Free Individual. that seems little more than a way of moving elements around in order to generate a new Angst amongst a conservative demographic, which is little more than a device being used by political organizations and television networks with an interest in maintaining a coherent conservative demographic that they can sell products to, including themselves.
but it has little to do with the complications concerning the decision to end the life of another.
it seems to trivialize the matter.
maybe that is in itself therapeutic.
it's not for me to speculate about that, really.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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