The choice to live or not to live
To the editor,
First of all, the repeated use of "fuck" does not make your article (“Let’s put this mercy killing to rest,” Imprint Volume 29, Issue 17) any stronger. It makes you sounds like a raving imbecile. Let me ask you: How would you like to have an illness where your brain continues functioning fully but you are slowly trapped inside a dead body? You’re not able to communicate, eat, move or show emotion. You’re stuck in bed soiling yourself with a tube shoved in your body feeding you liquid food. Yeah, sounds like the natural way of life!
And you think the family members would be hurt and abandoned if the person wanted to have their miserable, painful existence ended? It is absolute torture to see someone you love live with excruciating pain every single day of their life. Consider watching an 80-year old man slowly revert back to child-like functionality. being unable to dress themselves and being forced to use a diaper. You say it’s selfish to die; I say it’s selfish to live!
I hate to break it to you, but the Bible is religion, so don’t try to shove it in our faces as an argument! Religion is becoming less and less popular as science evolves. I know almost as many atheists and agnostics as I do religious people. Bringing religion into the debate has become an invalid argument!
The euthanasia movement is not about forcing people into their graves. It’s about giving people a choice. If you want to live through a disease that eats away at your body, go ahead it’s your life! But if I choose not to suffer through the the remainder of life, I should, at least, be able to opt out of having my mind and body ravaged by disease!
*Grumble*
Who are you calling a gay Nazi?
Black people should sit at the back of the bus. The Holocaust never happened. Oh, I’m sorry. Was I offensive? I was just trying to be funny. Let’s get it straight. Brendan Pinto’s recent distasteful attempt at being funny in his “satirical” article was homo-negative and was taken adversely by the majority of the campus gay community.
I’m sure right now a few of you are throwing your hands up in exasperation and mumbling “lighten up” or something about the freedom of expression. Well, let me take you through a history lesson to enlighten you why calling a part of the gay community “Lesbianazis” and the “Gaystapo” is sacreligious on many levels.
In 1934, the Gestapo, the secret police of Germany’s Nazi party were instructed to compile a list of gay individuals. This list was then used by the Nazis to round up gay men in all of Germany and try to get them to give up their “immoral” lifestyle and if they refused, they were put in concentration camps alongside the Jews of the Holocaust under the “Extermination through Work” policy carried out by the Nazis. Over one million gay German men were targeted with roughly 100,000 of them being arrested and half of them serving as convicts in concentration camps simply for their chosen expression of love. That number does not include hundreds more men who were castrated by the Nazis because they refused to adopt the straight lifestyle.
Now that we had that enlightening detour through history let me come back to Pinto’s recent apparently “non-homophobic” article and point out why expressions like Lesbianazi and Gaystapo are just as much if not more hurtful than calling an Israeli citizen a Judeo-Nazi. You just don’t do that. Millions of people sacrificed their lives for their way of life not so that certain wannabes can go around poking humour at these people’s sacrifices.
Our great country values the diversity among our ranks and the freedom of expression that all of us have benefited from. But another great nation, contemporary Germany, has a beautiful motto and that is “Never again.” Never again will the atrocities of the Holocaust be committed. My hope is that Canadians choose to be as responsible and sensitive in their actions and realize that the apparent comforts of today are the result of countless sacrifices deserving of the utmost respect and dignity.
*Growls, points*
*Roars, points*
GyyaaaAARRRGGGHHH!!!
*Goes into an Incredible Hulk-like rage*
Awesome. Congratulations on the ink. I certainly hope that clears everything up.
ReplyDeleteIt won't - or rather, didn't. That letter was from quite a few weeks ago, but apparently not everyone read it who should have.
ReplyDeleteYou know what else is kind of funny? These people that are complaining just now are completely ignoring all the other opportunities they had to get mad at Brendan. Of course, different people are going to have their own pet causes, but it makes you think. They thought he was serious in the past, yet didn't mind all the crazy things he said and people he discriminated against until he came for them.