On Death & Dying
I feel like this is the unspeakable subject in our culture. We are death-averse. We look for ways to beat it or cheat it, to grab more years than we otherwise would have. So we've developed surgeries that prolong life: heart surgeries, prostate surgeries, colon surgeries, transplants of all kinds. And we have drugs, both to cure illness and to prevent it in the first place.
I don't want it to sound like I'm against all of these medical breakthroughs and means of saving lives or prolonging life. Far from being a suicidal depressive, I'm living a happy life, and I want to go on living for awhile yet. and particularly when we're pain-free. And all of those surgeries I mentioned earlier allow many people years, even decades of life they otherwise would not have had.
No, what concerns me is not the life saving aspects of these development. What concerns me is the death-averseness of how we as a culture view these things. Because we have all these surgeries and drugs, we seem to think that the medical profession can fix anything. That's especially true since we've developed resuscitation techniques that actually bring people back from the brink of death.
We've gotten into the mode of thinking safety first. We have become cautious in the extreme. That, I think, is the reason for all of the "wrongful death" lawsuits and other lawsuits. It's convenient to blame lawyers, and there are lawyers who will sue anybody for anything because they know they'll get a settlement. But the biggest problem is us. We think we're entitled to life without risk, that we can make a mistake and have somebody else pay for it because they made it possible for us to make a mistake.
Take SUVs as an example. People drive SUVs as if they are cars, and the auto makers market them that way. But SUVs are trucks. They're more top-heavy than cars, and they should not be driven as fast as one drives a car because they're more massive than cars and take longer to stop and are less maneuverable. Yet we drive them like cars (oh, and we drive our cars too fast, too). And driving SUVs like cars, we're somehow surprised when they act like trucks.
For me, it comes back to personal responsibility. If you're going to drive your SUV like it's a sports car, don't whine when you roll it over. Sure the SUV should be made safer, but that doesn't excuse the driver going 75 or 80 mph on the freeway who rolls the SUV when making a sudden evasive maneuver (particularly when the sudden maneuver can be even partly blamed on the fact that you're driving faster than the legal limit).
My Dad smoked for 61 years, and now he is dying of lung cancer. What I admire most about him at this point in his life is that he's not interested in blaming the tobacco companies for his addiction or its now-evident consequences. He realized that he made the choice, and he accepts his cancer as a consequence of it. Yes, tobacco is the most addictive substance legally allowed for sale in the world, and smoking is a choice that each of us makes, one way or the other.
As with anything in this blog, I'd be interested in your comments.
I don't want it to sound like I'm against all of these medical breakthroughs and means of saving lives or prolonging life. Far from being a suicidal depressive, I'm living a happy life, and I want to go on living for awhile yet. and particularly when we're pain-free. And all of those surgeries I mentioned earlier allow many people years, even decades of life they otherwise would not have had.
No, what concerns me is not the life saving aspects of these development. What concerns me is the death-averseness of how we as a culture view these things. Because we have all these surgeries and drugs, we seem to think that the medical profession can fix anything. That's especially true since we've developed resuscitation techniques that actually bring people back from the brink of death.
We've gotten into the mode of thinking safety first. We have become cautious in the extreme. That, I think, is the reason for all of the "wrongful death" lawsuits and other lawsuits. It's convenient to blame lawyers, and there are lawyers who will sue anybody for anything because they know they'll get a settlement. But the biggest problem is us. We think we're entitled to life without risk, that we can make a mistake and have somebody else pay for it because they made it possible for us to make a mistake.
Take SUVs as an example. People drive SUVs as if they are cars, and the auto makers market them that way. But SUVs are trucks. They're more top-heavy than cars, and they should not be driven as fast as one drives a car because they're more massive than cars and take longer to stop and are less maneuverable. Yet we drive them like cars (oh, and we drive our cars too fast, too). And driving SUVs like cars, we're somehow surprised when they act like trucks.
For me, it comes back to personal responsibility. If you're going to drive your SUV like it's a sports car, don't whine when you roll it over. Sure the SUV should be made safer, but that doesn't excuse the driver going 75 or 80 mph on the freeway who rolls the SUV when making a sudden evasive maneuver (particularly when the sudden maneuver can be even partly blamed on the fact that you're driving faster than the legal limit).
My Dad smoked for 61 years, and now he is dying of lung cancer. What I admire most about him at this point in his life is that he's not interested in blaming the tobacco companies for his addiction or its now-evident consequences. He realized that he made the choice, and he accepts his cancer as a consequence of it. Yes, tobacco is the most addictive substance legally allowed for sale in the world, and smoking is a choice that each of us makes, one way or the other.
As with anything in this blog, I'd be interested in your comments.
posted by Tom | 5:55 PM
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