Kinda Lame

Share This Post:

What do you do with an old dog who can’t stand up anymore? You do the “humane” thing and put them, to sleep. People will tell you it’s the right thing to do, that you are doing right by that animal by killing it. You are being merciful. You do the right thing.

What about your dying relative? I’d be willing to bet that 70% of people feel that it’s also “humane” to kill them too; although the level of their suffering differs between each person. This movement has gained momentum, it seems to me in the past years, but I think it’s our pets fault.

We’ve “put down” animals for so many years. When a horse is hurt, a pet ages or we come upon a hurt animal we feel the right thing is to take their life. I think this has put us in the position to make the leap to take the life of a breathing person.

I’m not even trying to make the argument that we aren’t doing The Right Thing (TM). I just see where we are moving. I agree with the science of evolution and the idea of things like animal husbandry (genetical selection of animal stock for our benefit). The problem is things like the selection of your childs sex or eye color.

We’ve seen animals as objects for so long that it has changed our view of people. Maybe it is psychological, maybe we don’t identify with an unborn child or someone so sick they can’t talk. Maybe they become to us an animal. I once made tremendous fun of Terri Schiavo, and I don’t regret it. What I somewhat regret is how I began to see her as something and not someone. I never really formed a real opinion on if she should be, killed perhaps, but I never identified.

Yes you could say “how can you identify with someone that has no brain function?” How could you want a loved one to suffer? I just fear the people who view this as such a casual matter. People, I fear, have become even more casual to the mystery and beauty of life. We’ve learned the sex of our children long enough to think it’s a good idea to decide that for your liking.

The begining and end of life is not something that should be played with plain and simple. It is just one justification after another. This is the proverbial slippery slope. It can take us places that we don’t want to think we are capable of. We can’t imagine, even though we’ve been there before, what people can do with justification.

It seems our morality swings in our history here on Earth. We seem to build up our empathy and we lose it. We now though are becoming even more selfish than usual. Most people first cite themself as the reason they shouldn’t have, sorry, couldn’t have a disabled child.

This is all one arguement I feel. All of it is born out of not identifying with the subject of the conversation at hand. A pet, an aging loved one or an unborn child. They don’t speak, they don’t talk to us and we lose sight of them. Most people don’t agree, and I feel as if I am putting myself in camp of people I don’t care much for, but there is nothing wrong with not going with popular morality.

Again I’m not making the “inhumane” argument here. I just want to study the idea of how people make either one. I fear either extreme. But this one, the laziness of which people look at life, is even more scary. I could make all types of arguments for both sides and call out the opposite, but we all need to look a little deeper at what we are deciding.

In these economic times this line of thinking becomes even more troublesome. I just hope again the moderates come out on top.