Category: What Can You Do Series

Covid killed mostly old people. That saved the government money in the long run, although in the short run it was expensive, except for Sweden where they just euthanized their old people with Covid instead of treating them. (Gave them opiods even when they had enough oxygen and drugs.)

Since Covid, however, there’s been an unfortunate increase in people who can’t work because they’re chronically ill.

This isn’t hard to understand. Britain is massively importing young people who can work, or older people who have lots of money, but at the same time the number of people who are liabilities, financially speaking, is exploding. If you have a liability the easiest way to get rid of it is to… get rid of it.

Canada’s in the same boat, and these bills will spread.

Assisted suicide isn’t automatically a bad thing, mind you. If people were properly supported and cared for I’d support it. People who are in a ton of pain and won’t get better ought to have the option.

But when the government is whining about benefits and cutting them, as in Britain, one doesn’t expect this is being done from a humanitarian impulse. And the medical and social workers, in hospitals and palliative care centers that are overstretched and don’t have enough nurses or doctors or beds, well, convincing someone who’s taking up time or a bed to just die already will have to be pretty tempting, sometimes even with somewhat good motives: to free up resources for people who can be cared for.

But, of course, what will often happen is that chronically ill people or homeless types who could live for quite a long time and with proper care could be fairly happy will wind up dead because in Britain and Canada we don’t help them enough: to get enough housing, food, help and pain meds (given the way we’re so scared of opiates.)

Wikipedia lists some known cases of abuse of the law:

In 2017, a mother of a young woman with cerebral palsy was told by a doctor that not applying for MAID was “selfish”. Her daughter was in the room when the conversation took place and described the experience as traumatic.^[71]
In 2018, Roger Foley was being treated for cerebellar ataxia at an Ontario hospital. Foley alleged that his only options were to be forcibly discharged from the hospital and then treated by an organization that had previously failed to provide him adequate care or apply for MAID. Foley hired a lawyer for a charter challenge.^[72]
In 2019, Alan Nichols successfully applied for MAID while being hospitalized for suicide ideation. The reason given on his application was hearing loss.^[1]
In September 2021, Rosina Kamis, a 41-year-old Malaysian woman, applied for MAID citing fibromyalgia as the reason. However, in conversations and recordings shared with friends, she mentioned financial hardship and social isolation as additional factors influencing her decision.^[73]
In February 2022, an anonymous Torontonian suffering from extreme chemical sensitivity syndrome with the pseudonym Sophia had a medically assisted death after failing to find affordable housing that was free from tobacco smoke and other chemicals.^[74] This case was addressed by her health care provider in testimony provided to the Special Joint Committee on MAID, and was referenced in their final report.^[75]

One can safely assume there are many, many more. The fact is that even doctors and social workers think some lives are worth more than others. No one who’s spent time in the medical system believes otherwise.

The West is in decline. Our elites are wedded to austerity as a “solution”. They often, probably usually, feel that people who are non-productive are useless eaters and a burden on the state.

That combination is going to lead to a truly vast expansion of measures intended to get people off benefit rolls.

In a way assisted suicide, or euthanasia, is the most honest of those policies and maybe even the most merciful. There’s nothing honest about deliberate policies which make people homeless, leading to most of their deaths, after all. Politicians know that winding up on the street long term is essentially a death sentence, they know that policies like mass immigration without increasing the housing supply to match will cause homelessness, so they know their policies cause homelessness and death but they can pretend it’s an unintended side effect.

Just killing people is at least not hypocritical.

***

Close to the end of the annual fundraiser, which has been weaker than normal despite increased traffic. Given how much I write about the economy, I understand, but if you can afford it and value my writing, I’d appreciate it if you subscribe or donate.

What Can You Do In Troubled Times?

By Ian Welsh

On January 17, 2017

Comments

Most of what I write is analysis or sermon; when I write about what can be done, I usually write about what society can do and rarely what individuals can do.

However I’ve had a few requests for writing about what my readers can do, in the situation we now find ourselves and in the situation as it will unfold in the years to come.

Whatever happens, the future will be interesting: The certainties of the neoliberal era will be replaced by actual, rapid political, technological, and economic change. Combined with the oncoming shocks of environmental change, it’s going to be a fascinating time to live in.

And that’s the first thing I suggest readers do: Change the way they view what is coming. Much of it will be bad, yes, but it will also be a compelling time to live in. Perhaps when growing up you imagined what it would be like to live in times of crisis and hardship? They will soon be upon us, and while we might not have chosen that, we can only act as Gandalf told Frodo.

Frodo: I wish the Ring had never come to me. I wish none of this had happened.

Gandalf: So do all who live to see such times, but that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to us.”

Let us start, first, with death.

All of us were born to die. We have only a small amount of time on Earth. The question is not if we are going to die, but how we live. The simple practice to deal with this is to imagine your death. It sounds horrible, but in fact people who do it often find themselves happier afterwards. Get comfortable with what is inevitable, and much of the fear of it goes away. And when you no longer fear death, much of life’s remaining fear leaves.

At most, the onrushing crisis may have changed when and how you’ll die. It hasn’t changed the basic existential fact that all that exists, ends. In this knowledge, held deeply, there is freedom.

Having accepted your death, you can move on to the business of living, including, if you choose, not dying quite so soon. Life at all costs, in my opinion, isn’t worth it, but each of us must decide what price we will pay for another scrap of life, what we’re willing to do to breath another day. This may be hard labor, it may be moral compromise, it may just be cleverness and outwitting death.

Just as there is great comfort in acknowledging death, there is great comfort in knowing what we will and won’t do. The lines we won’t cross define us more than perhaps anything else, whatever and wherever they are. And this is the second step: What will I do, what won’t I do?

The third psychological step I suggest is comfort with pain and loss; an acceptance of it. In preparing for death, we imagine our death; in preparing for pain and loss, we remember what we have lost and the pain we have experienced in the past.

Dwell in it for a bit, bring the memories up if you can bear them, then remember the other side.

You survived. You are still here. You are still you. You survived the loss of people or things you loved; you survived pain. You can take it, and still function.

A sense of relaxation towards pain and loss actually makes both hurt less. Suffering is what we add to misfortune, when we accept what is happening and has happened, we suffer less. This doesn’t mean not trying to avoid pain and loss when that makes sense, simply that it is not always unavoidable and that railing against inevitability is foolish and makes the event worse.

Having done these three things, turn your gaze outward, to the good things that remain in the world. What do you still love? What still gives you joy? Is it some people you love? Is it, perhaps, something as simple as the taste of the food; the wind on your face, the steering wheel under your hands? Find those things, dwell in what you love, and enjoy.

Having completed these four tasks (and it will take some time, done properly), you will find that you look to the past with far less regret, the future with far less fear, and the present with far more joy.

These steps may not seem “practical” but if your head and heart aren’t straight, nothing else will work well.

Future articles in this series will deal with “practical” issues as well as psychological, but the first step is to get loose and easy again, to believe you can handle what’s coming, and that it’s worth doing so. Perhaps you will even be able to look forward to the future as fun; a challenge worth meeting, in hard times.

Loss and pain will still find us, of course, but we can handle it. And nothing we lose was ours to keep forever anyway, because none of us, as humans at least, are eternal.

The times are changing, and they are going to be hard times for most. The good will still exist and these are the times that others will read of and imagine, “What would it have been like to live then? Could I have handled it?”

Those who live on are those doomed and honored to live in such times.

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The horizon is not so far as we can see, but as far as we can imagine

Category: What Can You Do Series

Why Assisted Suicide Bills Will Proliferate & Deaths Will Increase

What Can You Do In Troubled Times?