Death With Dignity

Imagine being able to vote for reducing, and perhaps eliminating, human pain and suffering.  Now, imagine voting against that.

This is what's happening in the Iowa legislature right now -- and I'm not even talking about medical marijuana!  I'm talking about a proposed Death With Dignity Act, which is more widely (and crudely) known as physician-assisted suicide.

This may seem like a radical idea in Iowa, but it isn't elsewhere.  Oregon currently has a similar Death With Dignity Act, and other states are considering it.

Under the Iowa version of this Act, "An adult patient who is competent, is a resident of this state, has been determined by the patient’s attending physician and consulting physician to be suffering from a terminal disease, and has voluntarily expressed a wish to die, may make a written request for medication that the patient may self-administer to end the patient’s life…”

In short, this would allow some terminally-ill, suffering Iowans the option of a more peaceful, non-painful death.  It would reduce human pain and suffering.  So naturally, social conservatives (mostly Republicans) and our governor-for-life Terry Branstad, oppose it.

Taking one's life is obviously not something to be taken lightly.  And this Act doesn't do that.  It simply allows a competent person the freedom to make a choice to forego their pain, a choice that harms no one else.

It's different, yet in some ways the same as the medical marijuana debate.  The old, white, conservative males who dominate the legislative and executive branch are either unable or unwilling to understand that science, and attitudes, change over time.  They think they know better -- don't confuse them with evidence to the contrary.

The other day, a friend of mine put it about as eloquently as you can:  Some people just don't believe in evolution, past or present.

Ruining A Great Invention

The internet, as we know it, has been around since roughly 1990.  It was only for sending and receiving text at first, but by the mid-to-late 1990s, the World Wide Web became available.  This allowed us to electronically visit places (web sites) with pictures and later videos, which we would ultimately be able to pass along to others.

With that brief history of the internet in mind, I would compare it to any of mankind’s greatest inventions.  It may not be quite up there with the alphabet or the automobile, but it’s at least in the conversation with the printing press.

Unfortunately, that conversation would have to include whether the internet is now used as much for evil as it is for good, thanks in part to the proliferation of Facebook / Twitter / social media.  I don’t just mean terrorist type evil, either.  I mean the little bits of evil, things like trolling and bullying, and lies that get passed along as fact and influence behavior in a negative way.

I’m not the most internet-connected person, yet not a day goes by that I don’t see a false or questionable internet-sourced item that’s presented as fact.  (This is particularly true in national political election years like this one.)  It happened to me today, it happened to me yesterday, it will surely happen to me tomorrow.

I’m usually skeptical enough to figure it out on my own (sometimes with the help of snopes.com) but let’s face it, most people swallow whatever they’re sent as the truth.  That wouldn’t be so bad, but in our instant gratification world, those fake-truth-swallowers not only agree with what they see, they also have to affirm it, often by sending it along to other fake-truth-swallowers.

Using the internet in this way this isn’t good for civilization, but short of another evil called censorship, there are no rules of engagement to keep it from happening.  That’s a shame, really, for one of the greatest inventions of all-time.