Let's kill all the old people

I have to give my left-wing friends some credit. They are really good at making up touchy-feely names for some really bad ideas. Whether it is “contributions” as a word for tax increases or “protection of the environment” to justify complete and total control over your property and business or “investments” for out of control government spending (e.g. “I want to invest in our schools for our children” is another way of saying “I want to steal your money and give it to the teachers’ union bosses, who will then give it back to me so I can stay in power and use the kids as the excuse for the whole scheme”), the lefties in this country can come up with really pretty-sounding titles for extremely dangerous concepts.

Take the so-called “Death with Dignity” idea being tossed around California these days and introduced into our legislature as AB 654. The lefties sell it as a “compassionate” means of dealing with “end of life” decisions. People should be left with the “choice” to bring a “swift and painless” end to a “full and complete life.” It is a “courageous” choice, which should be “overseen” by a “licensed professional” who will fully evaluate whether the person who wants this “humane” end to his or her “tortured existence” is competent to reach this very “personal and emotional” decision.

For all the pretty words, “death with dignity” is just a nice way of saying we just wish the old, the disabled, the mentally ill, or anyone with more than normal problems would just spare us all the trouble and kill themselves. We’ll give them the pills, we’ll find them a doctor who will convince them they would be better off dead, and then we’ll make sure they off themselves quickly and painlessly.

Everywhere it has been authorized, this form of “voluntary euthanasia” has turned houses of healing into killing fields. In the Netherlands, many of the aged and/or infirm will not go into a hospital out of fear that the doctors in those hospitals will order their deaths. In Oregon, in the two short years that their “compassionate” statute has been in effect, there have been five documented cases of people who died under suspicious circumstances using this statute.

About 30 years ago, a court held in the case of Karen Ann Quinlan that medical care could be withheld from a comatose patient. Twenty years ago, a court held that food and water are medical treatment and a person can refuse that treatment if he or she is mentally competent. Today, we have hospitals and hospices essentially requiring people to terminate food and water “treatments” on the grounds that helping some people would just be futile (read “too expensive” in the era of managed care). What was once an “individual choice” has turned into a medical mandate requiring the old and the infirm to forego treatment that can alleviate or cure the symptoms of a disease.

In 1933, Joseph Goebbels produced a movie in Nazi Germany extolling the virtues of “death with dignity.” Six years later, in the midst of the war, to “save money” the German government built a number of gas chambers which were then used to euthanize the physically and mentally disabled. Three years after that, those same gas chambers were used to solve the “Jewish” problem in Germany. Our country has rejected euthanasia and “death with dignity” for the last 70 years for a reason. History has taught us that these concepts have been used by governments throughout this world to justify the most horrible injustices that people have ever visited upon their fellow human beings. It is always sold as an instrument of freedom, and it always ends of as a tool of terror.