I want to take your mind to a very dark and evil place today. I want you to feel the rotted breath of depravity surrounding you like August humidity and to smell the putrid stench of inhumanity. I do this because I have read today two ominous warnings about our future, which barely conceal a more sinister possibility than we would openly admit.
First, the Washington Post spelled out how Americans have lost 40 percent of their net worth between 2007 and 2010. The second article came from the Wall Street Journal and it shattered the dreams of millions of Baby Boomers by telling the harsh truth that they will likely not inherit enough from their parents to retire. Both articles were warnings to those who are paying careful attention. They both warned us to become aware of how we see the value of human life.
Over the course of history there have been any number of examples where population control was taken very seriously. Wars have been fought to eliminate entire cultures. Ethnic cleansing has and is taking place around the world. The Holocaust was designed to eliminate a race of people, to kill millions more and to secure for the few at the top vast riches by the conquest of entire nations.
The concept of eugenics to control the births of African-American babies and others deemed “inferior” was adopted as part of the goal of those such as Margaret Sanger who championed the abortion movement in America. The idea of controlling births to improve the species was advocated by scientists such as Charles Darwin and supported by people such as Winston Churchill, Theodore Roosevelt, H.G Wells and George Bernard Shaw.
Somewhere in all of their minds there existed the idea that those currently living in this world should have the right to decide who should be given the chance to live and who should not. There was a serious disconnect between their way of thinking and those who saw life as a gift from God; who saw conception in the womb as an act of Divine intervention.
Today, in some parts of the world, there are those who have taken the same thinking and applied it to end-of-life decisions as well. For example, in the Netherlands today and since about 2002, the practice of assisted suicide has been legalized. There is a new call for the right of any person over the age of 70 to have the absolute right to end his life upon his own choosing.
While this practice is still a crime in the United States, a looming financial crisis could change that. As millions of Baby Boomers move into retirement age and their medical and housing care becomes a large part of the budget at various levels of government, there is a risk that their lives will be seen as a “drain” upon the treasury.
No longer productive in terms of working and paying taxes, with the benefits of modern medicine extending their lives well past 80 and into their 90s, younger generations of Americans have already began voicing objection to “subsidizing” grandma. Calls for entitlement reform, which include cuts to Medicare and Social Security are the first steps down that slippery slope.
As more humans live longer and longer and become more dependent upon government assistance, leaving fewer and fewer dollars to their children as an inheritance, the public discussion of ending their lives earlier could very likely increase.
Already President Obama has suggested that maybe a very old person might be better off “not having the surgery, but taking the pain killer.” As we all know, pain killers are the drugs administered to euthanize people.
Was the president suggesting euthanasia? I’m sure he’d deny it, but those were his words, not mine. Even if his intention was other than support for euthanasia, might he have been suggesting that we stop providing life extending care to seniors so that they don’t live as long?
After all, in that same speech he said that we as a culture, in our own families and for ourselves, need to start thinking about ways in which to end the “waste” which isn’t making anybody “better.” Does this suggest that by “better” he meant more robust, more productive more youthful? Even if the end of life is a slow decline to certain death, for which there is no cure, are we on the verge of deciding that it would be better to let it end earlier, and if so, how early? And if we are going to withhold care that doesn’t make people “better,” how do we deal with the developmentally disabled, the mentally retarded and the severely handicapped whose conditions cannot be “cured”? If they can’t be made “better,” do we administer the “pain killer”?
Are we there yet? God, I hope not. But before they put the remains of the first Jews, non-Jewish Poles and Slovenes, religious and political prisoners, Roma and Sinti, Freemasons, Jehovah’s Witnesses, criminals, homosexuals and prisoners of war in ovens at Auschwitz, Birkenau and Dachau or lined them up and shot them at the edge of earthen pits, somebody had to lay the first brick on the smokestacks, start up the first bulldozer and dig the pit, string the barbed wire, hook up the transport trains and hand out Star of David patches to be sewn onto their jackets.
Evil rarely jumps at you like it does in the movies. More often than not it beguiles your mind first into believing that it is not evil at all to think evil thoughts.
How do you feel when you think about your parents living until they are 95, consuming all of their assets to stay barely alive in a nursing home rather than leaving you the money? Has it ever crossed your mind to sell their house before the “nursing home takes it”?
The canary in the coal mine has smelled the sulfur and is gasping for air. Pay heed.
Marcus Carey is a Northern Kentucky lawyer with 32 years experience. He is also a farmer, talk radio host and public speaker who loves history and politics. He is a prolific and accomplished writer whose blog, BluegrassBulletin.com is “dedicated to honest and respectful comment on the political and cultural issues of our time.” He writes a regular commentary for KyForward.
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