We used to know this

The natural inclination to protect and save lives used to be a fundamental characteristic of our society. It still is hopefully for most people. But many have been duped by semantic engineering into believing that when a group like the Hemlock Society changes its name to ‘Compassion & Choices’, their counselors aren’t really assisting people in committing suicide.

The New York Times Sunday Magazine had a piece that opens with this reality check:

“There is but one truly serious philosophical problem,” Albert Camus wrote, “and that is suicide.” How to explain why, among the only species capable of pondering its own demise, whose desperate attempts to forestall mortality have spawned both armies and branches of medicine in a perpetual search for the Fountain of Youth, there are those who, by their own hand, would choose death over life? Our contradictory reactions to the act speak to the conflicted hold it has on our imaginations: revulsion mixed with fascination, scorn leavened with pity. It is a cardinal sin — but change the packaging a little, and suicide assumes the guise of heroism or high passion, the stuff of literature and art.

Yes, social engineers have changed the packaging, a lot.

Jumping ahead in this long piece…

Little wonder, then, that most of us have come to regard suicide with an element of resignation, even as a particularly brutal form of social Darwinism: perhaps through luck or medication or family intervention some suicidal individuals can be identified and saved, but in the larger scheme of things, there will always be those driven to take their own lives, and there’s really not much that we can do about it.

Oh, but there is, starting with education of the public. There are plenty of people and organizations devoted to that, as the real common good of society, upholding the dignity of the human person from conception (fertilization) to natural death. And natural death does not mean withholding food and water.

Good thing that Times piece ends with hope and humanity.

“It’s watching my hands come off that railing and thinking to myself, My God, what have I just done? Because I know that almost everyone else who’s gone off that bridge, they had that exact same thought at that moment. All of a sudden, they didn’t want to die, but it was too late. Somehow I made it; they didn’t; and now I feel it’s my responsibility to speak for them.”