I refer to the Editorial Viewpoint "Better early than too late” (Parsiana, September 7-20, 2024) about assisted dying.
"Man is born free,” declared French philosopher and writer Jean Jacques Rousseau, ruefully adding, "but everywhere is in chains.” Nowhere is the rejoinder’s irony more manifest than in the act of suicide, both unassisted and assisted (euthanasia). As though suicide’s contemplation and, thereafter, execution (admittedly a morbid word choice), is not hard enough, all sorts of extraneous and unnecessary barriers are erected to thwart what is possibly the most profound and singularly personal act, as William Shakespeare’s Hamlet states, to "end the heartache and the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to.” The obstacles are by the church (by which I mean any religion) and state, the twin banes of human existence, everywhere and for too long, with the medical profession seeking refuge behind the somewhat apocryphal Hippocratic Oath of first doing no harm.
But religion is predicated on ethics, not the other way around, as we are led to believe. This is done way before we can really start thinking, lest we see through subterfuges of the sacred and arrive at antipodal (entirely opposed) conclusions. We are brought up with a litany of lies that are part and parcel of religious inculcations, not the least of which is the idea that life is for god to give and, hence, only god’s to take away. Never mind that nobody knows what god is (or good, or harm) except as an artifact of human imagination born out of ignorance and its concomitant, fear. Life is kept on artificial support by the so-called god’s all-too-human representatives, way past the expiration date. Governments — even secular ones — defer to, and tacitly collude with religions, giving religious sentiment a free pass with a wink and a nod, the better to maintain a hold over the multitudes and preserve social order and stability in cahoots with its ecclesiastic counterparts, to the mutual benefit of both.
Hence the injunctions against suicide, both by the church and state, are as risible and onerous as they are unreasonable and unjustifiable. No one has a say in their entry into the world; everyone must, a fortiori, have full autonomy and absolute right over one’s own life: to keep living or to seek an early exit — for whatever reason. But especially for those pitiable unfortunates among us who are terminally ill; those who are incessantly in excruciating pain; those whose every gasp for breath is fraught with the terror visited upon one who is seemingly ever sinking but never quite drowning. Being, in a manner, waterboarded (subjected to an interrogation technique usually regarded as a form of torture in which water is forced into a detainee’s mouth and nose so as to induce the sensation of drowning) by their antagonists in the spotless white of medical gown, or religious raiment, or politician’s garb. ZEND LAKDAVALA
Las Vegas, USA
zocrateszend@yahoo.com