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Kevorkian


1.  "You're in a pitch black space.  Everything around you is dark, so
    dark that you can't see your hand in front of your face.  Now,
    there's a tiny point of light off in the distance.  How do you
    feel about that light?"

    Some crackpot pop-psychology quiz included this question, and how
    you felt about the light was supposedly how you felt about death.
    Don't ask me why; I'm afraid I might know.

8.  If a lawmaker or a law-wielder were to manifest a belief in
    people's abilities to make their own decisions, come to their own
    conclusions, choose advisors who have their best interests at
    heart, and act ethically on their own initiative motivated by
    compassion, would that lawmaker or law-wielder also manifest great
    big identity crises and insecurity issues?

9.  What can I say about a serial killer who kills only people who
    consent to being killed?  What can I say about the victims?  Just
    what is Informed Consent anyway?  "Before you confirm your
    choice to end it all, I need to ask if this is your True Will."

    The one time I felt like killing myself, it was substantially
    because I Didn't Want to Be a Burden.  The feeling passed, and now
    I'm still a Burden, but I'm okay with it.  Does that mean I'm
    better?  Stronger?  Faster?

3.  I don't wanna die!  You can't MAKE me!  I will do everything in
    my power to keep from dying sooner than I have to, and I don't
    CARE if it means your nephew has to live in pain for an extra
    ten years and suck your family fortune dry!  Give me them
    life-extending drugs NOW!  Huh?  Exercise?  Eat right?  Step away
    from the TV?  Quit smoking?  Why should I?

10. "Can we have your liver, then?"

6.  Who gets to decide how many lives I get?  If I place my bet on the
    wedge that says death is but a Reboot of the Soul, then suicide
    ain't no thing, right?  Murdered, hit by a bus, mauled by the last
    tiger of the wild, however I die I come back, and I've got
    millions of years in which to recover from the trauma and attain
    Whatever.  Death is a door in the House of Many Rooms, and life
    is but a hallway.

    If this life is all I get, then ANY death is the same robbery.
    Would I rather feel bad than feel nothing at all?  But I don't
    know what it's like to have Lou Gehrig's Disease, so I'm not
    qualified to answer for that sort of pain.  
    Is Congress?

2.  Doctor-assisted suicide and doctor-committed murder (the date-rape
    of murders?) is something that happens to other people.  So is
    pain-worse-than-death. 

7.  Atropos is a babe, and her whip stings so deliciously.  Please
    don't tell me I can't go out with her.

4.  Don't make me.
    Don't unmake me.
    Don't prohibit me from making myself.
    Don't prohibit me from unmaking myself.
    Convince me.  Okay, -try- to convince me.
    The great unknowns are formed from what comes before life, and
    what comes after death.  What does humanity do with great
    unknowns?  We make gods out of them, of course.  We assign wills
    to those gods, and use smoke and mirrors and rhetoric and force to
    form a voice coming out of that great unknown.
    Does that voice love us?
    Does that voice want us to join it?
    Do we tell our siblings to go away and cuddle God instead?

5.  Time was, we had to kill them.
    Now they kill themselves and we reap the benefits.

    Time was, we had to shackle them.
    Now they pay us for the privilege of forging their own.

    Does this mean we win?


-skyler, March 30, 1999