Assisted Dying, who is the relevant person here?
Assisted Dying, that current heightened subject in the ‘UK’, has been passed by the Scottish Parliament today, to move on to Committee stage. The media channels, and especially BBC Radio 4, gives the matter central air time and not from the decision of a Parliamentary vote in favour. The subject is dying, and we are all going to die, because all humans are part of the life zone on planet Earth, just one of the bodies held in gravity around Helios. Because we live, we die, it is just a fact of life, no pun intended. The fact of life is also the fact of death, which in this question means physical matter death. The realm of spirit is different again, and one which evidence proves is as natural as life and death of physical matter, but spirit dimensions and ‘life after death’ are not the subject of the Assisted Dying debates going on in the present day.
Each time this question meets the public sphere, as it certainly does when a Parliament votes to move it forward, as Westminster and Holyrood have now both done, and the Isle of Mann, and Jersey, but let’s stick with Westminster and Edinburgh, while strangely the go-ahead Welsh on language and respect for landscape features such as Yr Wyddfa (and you’d have to be a native Welsh speaker to pronounce that one, wouldn’t you!) have less room for discussion on the matter of assisted dying, because it is really Westminster and Edinburgh which BBC Radio 4 follow. Again today, again, because the subject of assisted dying is public news, the reflex is to give air time to someone in a wheelchair. In England that person is a well-known sportswoman, and in Scotland today, that person is an MSP. If it was said, what’s it got to to do with them, then accusations of discrimination against disabled people would fly, both are women so accusations of misogyny would soon follow, and everything heads to the usual shut down of any real discussion or relevance.
What is missing in this debate on assisted dying, it could be said,(as one must say in this age of near paranoia of offending someone), is that it is nothing to do with anybody except the person errr……dying. In a logical blog it is the height of illogicality to interview anybody on the subject of assisted dying – with the stated framework of a likely 6 month expectation of life, before a certain death (which we all will have), in England at least but still the same principles are in the motion in Scotland – who does not have a terminal illness that is very likely to lead to a bad end, a painful end, a traumatic end for them and all around them, and a period where life is not the lovely exchanges around a bedside as someone gently slips away. Some people have that, the one who is dying and then those around them, and what a lovely way to go. For others who will not be having a peaceful ending with perhaps a bit of pain relief at the end but nothing too grotesque, how incredibly disrespectful is it to have BBC Radio 4 interviewing people who use wheelchairs. To use a wheelchair must be unbelievably frustrating, but it is not a terminal illness. Nor is mental disability, nor is old age, nor is depression and nor is anything else except a terminal illness which is only going one way.
Why is it in this age of individualism, the ‘person centred’ obsession, the empathising and all the sugary psychological talk, that a person in bad pain, bad failing of bodily functions, possibly weeks or a few months, bad psychological state of having all the caring people staring at them 24/7, a person asking, begging, to be helped to move on, and which has no other interpretation than what they are saying, often someone who has lived a life to the full and not sat around, someone who is in a network of loving caring people who also do not want to see this unfolding horror of their last few weeks or months, why is it that they have to hear media channels holding a theatrical debate on everything but the obvious?
Since the unfortunate case of Harold Shipman despatching many people under the job title of doctor in the NHS a certain paranoia has risen, that anyone talking about death means they want to kill people. The Christians have always had their own rationale, based on beliefs which are not logical – as measured to Earth and Helios – and no doubt other religions also have their reasons. The NHS believes citizens live in it, from cradle to grave, and to reject the NHS is not far off the Christians in their belief of salvation and hell. Isn’t it strange that there is an obsession of crime writing, crime films, crime research in the ‘UK’, where literary festivals not put on a crime event because that is the one which will sell out on opening sales, while history, geography, natural history, the makers and observers are lucky to fill part seats. Put against the obsession with crime, murder, problems in life, why does something as natural as assisted dying, for someone who is only going one way and which any physician with any basic understanding can see, why is this subject such a public spectacle in the ‘UK’?
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