Last week I wrote this. It got several good responses and I learned that I am not always as clear as I wish I were. At any rate, Joel Gillespie challenged me with a good debate topic and I promised that I would have a response of some kind by Monday.
Here we are, and here it is.
I've got to admit, I was a little daunted by the subject matter and figured it would take all weekend to come up with anything. I did it on the car ride into class Saturday. It occurred to me that debates on "suicide" are always going to fall apart because the word is too broadly defined across the population.
I looked up the word in an online dictionary and the major definition is the taking, or intention of taking one's own life. I think this is a great definition and I doubt anyone would challenge it.
Oh, if only the world were so black and white. 90% of the time it is, but that last 10% of the time is a doozy. I'm not even talking about the chicken and egg scenarios like a guy who finds himself on death row when all the appeals have all run out, who hangs himself with his bed sheet. He killed himself. Suicide. No question, but if he was about to be killed anyway all he did was take control of the last thing he had any control over. Should I ever find myself on death row and all out of appeals, take my bed sheets if it is really important to you that the tax payers have to pay even more money to kill me. From my perspective, I've saved the tax payers some money and in my final act stuck it to the man. Its a win win.
Everything I just wrote, though true, was just a distraction designed to put you off balance before I talk about what I'm REALLY interested in.
I contend that the definition for suicide is correct but thanks to modern miracle and wonder, incomplete. It makes an assumption, that up to a very short time ago was a reasonable one. It assumes you were alive when you killed yourself. No, I am not drinking.
We are alive thanks to a number of very complex systems all working together to maintain our lives. During this lifetime we spend our existences doing things that put this delicate system in danger. We eat too many terrible for you foods, some of may have used cigarettes, alcohol, drugs, trans fats, breathed asbestos, touched mercury, and any number of other deadly chemicals. Some of us did physically dangerous activities. We all accept a certain amount of risk because at the end of the day most of us know that our brains are going to tell our hearts to beat and our lungs to breathe, and our mouths to eat, and our hands to avoid the fire, and our feet to avoid the ravenous copper headed water rattler.
We all know that when our heart stops beating, our brains stop sending or the signals don't reach their destinations, our livers stop cleaning our blood, our digestive systems stop breaking down food and elimination waste, or we can no longer draw a breath. We all know when these things happen, we are dead. Its a cascade failure scenario, something goes, and knocks down the next thing, which knocks down the next thing, and the house of cards falls. If it didn't we'd all be college age forever. (How much would that suck!)
But thanks to modern medicine, they have a machine for most every situation. Artificial hearts, iron lungs, dialysis, the list goes on, and all of these machines are true miracles of science. With them you can keep a brain thinking long after most every other system has said its long goodbye. But when did YOU die? There's the rub.
The knee jerk reaction is to say you are "alive" until the machines can no longer do the living for you. It might feel right, but is it true?
That same online dictionary defines life thus.
1. the condition that distinguishes organisms from inorganic objects and dead organisms, being manifested by growth through metabolism, reproduction, and the power of adaptation to environment through changes originating internally.
2. the sum of the distinguishing phenomena of organisms, esp. metabolism, growth, reproduction, and adaptation to environment.
I doubt anyone who agreed with the definition of suicide will disagree with the definition of life, or death for that matter.
1. the act of dying; the end of life; the total and permanent cessation of all the vital functions of an organism.
Again, no arguments, the assumption that everyone is going off of is the assumption that if you are alive, you are capable of maintaining life. Up until very recently this was a simple fact that no one would argue. But times have changed.
Now we can keep adding machines until there are no machines left to add. Its an interesting ethical quandary we've found the slippery slope and we're all screaming Weeeeee as we go. Every day someone comes up with either a new machine or an improvement on an old machine to eek out a few more cycles of something we aren't even sure what is.
So we have some new definitions of living to figure out.
You are no longer "living" when:
1. We run out of machines to hook you to.
2. You can no longer keep yourself that way without a machine.
3. You decide that you won't ever be able to maintain your own state of living without a machine.
4. You decide that you won't be able to be a productive member of society because of all of the machines in the way.
I think that the truth for you is inside of you and may change according to the situation. You'll say one thing again and again until you find yourself in that situation. Then you may or may not change your mind. There is no penalty for changing your mind. You might think to be interred is a penalty, but if the pain is bad enough, the penalty is to continue to hurt.
Thus the real debate is that there isn't one. Coffee, tea, or milk? Machine, machines, or au naturale?
It comes down to choice, and I say that choice is yours to make. My dear uncle made his choice back in April, and he's still with us. He eats with a machine, he poops with a machine, he breaths with a machine, his blood is cleaned with a machine, if you touch him, we will bleed, he is that fragile. But he lives because he says he does, or would if he could talk for the eating and breathing machines. Insurance has run out, Medicare has run out, the bank accounts have run out, and even the priest won't come to see him anymore. They're still pissed off that he chose to live in spite of them begging him to die back in June.
I for one am not sure which choice I'd make for myself, but it is my intent to be in heaven a day before the devil even knows I'm dead.
