A Perfect Storm (moved)

Admittedly, this is a re-write of an earlier blog post, which I removed when the tide of politics antiquated it. And nonetheless, there is still something necessary that one must hear, something good that can come of awareness. So I shall make a second attempt.
We’ve all heard of the phrase “the perfect storm” used when the weather conditions are right for something cataclysmic in the atmosphere. I’ve come to observe that a perfect storm in brewing in American health care too, most notably in the passage of Washington’s assisted suicide law, making my former home the second state (the first being Oregon) to allow doctors to administer a lethal dose of medication to patients who are terminally ill, cutting short their lives for the sake of “death with dignity.” (As an aside, I was impressed with a quotation on House, MD… how rarely I quote television, as I do not even own one… in which House states that there is no such thing as death with dignity, only life with dignity, death is always undignified. How true indeed!)
The perfect storm is brewing in this way:
The first condition to be met is that we must develop a culture in which some lives are easily discarded, no longer considered to be life at all. We will develop a whole new vocabulary for these lives, blastocyst is a perfect one, it makes humanity sound like worthless tissue. We will focus on a made-up problem of over-population (rather than under distribution) and assign control over who lives or dies to individuals rather than to God. Best yet, we’ll give the whole process a nice sounding name, something like “freedom of choice.”
A materialistic society will assist us in promoting this death ritual. Human life comes to be seen as burdensome, an obstacle to the greed of the individual. Babies are punishments inflicted on the irresponsible. No one who is too young, too old, or already has more than one or two of these little burdens is entitled to have another mouth to feed. We will scorn the family that has more than the allotted number, we will ban children from the public square. They are too noisy and messy. We will praise those who are “childless by choice.” The children we do have will be reduced to yet another possession, trophy children who are expected to excel for mommy dearest but never require sacrifices from the adults in their world.
On top of this we will overlay a lack of respect for aging and the elderly. We’ll bend over backwards to puff out our wrinkles, cover our grey, nip and tuck and lift. Our elderly will be removed from the family environment and the public square. Age will not be seen as a source of wisdom, instead it will be seen as a progression to becoming dependent on those who do not want to provide care, make sacrifices.
We’ll decide that some lives are not worth living. Anyone who is not physically perfect will suspect, seen as a burden on society. We will test children in the womb and encourage mothers to murder their unhealthy offspring. Mothers who fail to do so will be called “selfish” as they called Sarah Palin for bearing her son Trig. (And already in Austria a family has been denied the right to permanent residency, despite the fact that they immigrated from their home country to help Austria in the face of a shortage of doctors in the area—the father being a medical doctor—but they are denied the right to remain because the child has Down Syndrome and is too imperfect for their pristine society to want him around.) These lives will be conveniently snuffed out in utero, as 90% of Down Syndrome babies in America already are. This will also effectively reduce medical progress and societal acceptance of those who slip through the abortionist’s grasp, shortening their lives as fewer resources are available for them.
On top of these things, we’ll add an economic crisis, such that lives are reduced to dollars and cents, people worry about their own possession and finances, taxes and lack of profits are the great cultural fear.
And when all these things are accomplished, which in America they are, we will socialize health care. Suddenly your government will know the costs of keeping you alive, providing the care you need. Your imperfect self, your unhealthy fetus, are seen as leaches on the public dollar. The elderly and the infirm are no longer human, they are dollars and cents.
We’ll say we’re being compassionate, that we want to give them death with dignity, put them out of their suffering. We really mean we want to put them out of our economic suffering. We will encourage them to just shut up and die, then we will absolve ourselves for we can believe we are not their killers. Already in Oregon, patients have received letters from their insurance companies telling them their care is too expensive, especially compared to their income potential (think twice those of you who not only receive your health care from the government but are also living off the government dollar by being retired or on disability or welfare), they will no pay for your care because they see your life is not worth their expense, not worth living. But they’ll gladly pay to kill you, should your now untreated condition become too painful for you to bear.
In short, we have a perfect storm for a state which has the right to tell its citizens when to die.