On Death and Dying

Nobody wants to die. Well, that's not quite true. After all, lots of people take their own lives. I can't get into the mind of a suicide, but I wonder if it's simply that they want out of whatever situation they are in. They don't seek death, per se, but escape. And people who are in great pain seek death sometimes (but only sometimes).
On the whole, though, we resist death. But why? There seems to be a paradox here. If death is the way of life, why fight it? After all, we have to make room for the next generation, and someone has to feed the worms.
This paradox is most evident in religious thought. I was listening to bluegrass this morning (always makes me think on death and dying). The singer was singing about his mom and dad who were rejoicing around the throne of God. The chorus, however, went, "I'll live my life in sorrow, now that mommy and daddy are dead."
And of course Shakespeare weighed in on it. In a dialogue in, I think, The Merchant of Venice, the fool talks to one of the characters whose brother has died. The dialogue goes something like this (fuzzy quote alert):
"I think your brother is in Hell."
"I know my brother is in Heaven, fool."
"The more fool you, to grieve for your brother's being in Heaven."
If you don't believe in God or an afterlife, not wanting to die is understandable. After all, as W. E. Henley said, after life "looms the horror of the shade." Non-existence is almost too dreadful to be contemplated.
Yet, neither religious nor non-religious thought really makes any sense. Either we go to an eternal reward with angels and gold streets or we simply go out, like a light turned off. No big deal either way.
So why do thoughts of death consume us so?

Finishing up

You know those little jam packets at the restaurant? I've found that one of them is too much for a half-slice of toast, too small for a full slice. So, I have three options: 1) use one packet for a whole slice and not get enough, 2) use two packets for a slice of toast and get too much, or 3) use just enough and waste some jam. I never choose 3). And, if I'm eating, say, a chicken dish of some kind and am full to bursting, I will continue, and if I simply cannot eat any more, I'll hunt through the dish for chicken chunks and eat them. I have even caught myself muttering, "If the chicken died for me, I can bloody well eat it all."
I'm wondering at the source of this. It could well be the left-over influence of my mother's "Children starving in Asia" ploy that she used as part of her "clean the plate." syndrome. Or, and I like this because it's the nobler, it could be that I am very aware of the dynamics of life and death. In order for me to live, something has to die -- fruit, chicken, lettuce, whatever. Our whole existence is built on the destruction of other things, from landforms to linguine.
This is not something to despair over, or to try to prevent. Every other species in the world does the same thing. Not only that, but the wind does it, the waves do it, the clouds do it.
There is no such thing as the "balance of nature." All there is is a flux of forces, building, tearing down, moving around, shifting, always shifting. Best to move with it.
And yet, I still can't waste half a packet of jam.

Sanctity of life

I remember reading in a novel once the statement, "all life is infinitely precious." I remember thinking that sounded a little extreme. Are we talking bacteria here, or only those things that we can see as live? Or, do we move even up higher on the chain? I had an associate tell me she didn't eat anything that had a face. So, if it has eyes and a nose, its life is important; no nose, no sanctity?
But let's limit the discussion to humans, and say, "All human life is precious." I simply can't agree with that. But first, some background.
The idea that life is sacred has two sources, I think. The first is religion. We have no right, righteous people argue, to take over the powers of God. Note though, that that's not an argument for the sanctity of life. After all, God kills people left and right. The religious argument is that we're not God; ergo we can't decide.
The second argument is more along the lines of "If we say that one person's life isn't as important as another's, where do we stop?" Kind of the camel-with-its-nose-in-the-tent argument. The argument assumes that if we kill really bad guys, then we will progress to not so bad guys, to merely useless guys, to old guys, to helpless guys, until there's an orgy of destruction that spreads through the land like a plague ("guy" here is used as a trans-gender term). And yet, we make value decisions of the same kind, if not the same magnitude, every day. In fact, part of the human makeup is the ability to make clear-cut decisions on items that are really on a spectrum. There is no reason at all to assume that once we decide life is not inherently precious we'll kill our neighbors for their lawnmowers.
I believe that life is mysterious, wonderful, surpasses understanding, something that we can't create, etc. etc. etc. I do not believe, though, that life is "infinitely precious," not even human life. Some people are just better off dead.
But I'm not about to bump off people I think are a menace. For one thing, they kill you for doing that sort of thing.

Fraternity redux

I keep coming back to the problem of the young man who died of alcohol poisoning. I think it's that I am having trouble picking out the threads that weave through it, and the motives behind the persons making decisions. One curious thing seems to be that the death of the young man and the allegations of hazing have drifted apart. It seems clear that the partying (or hazing) incident gave an opportunity for the young man to overindulge, but didn't actually cause it. This comes from a kind of grudging account in the newspapers, which early on quoted someone as saying that the young man was "made" to drink vodka to a later admission that he wasn't forced to do anything.
The charges that have been filed on students include hazing and offering alcohol to a minor. The second is almost certainly true. The first may be also, but I'd be interested in finding out just what happened. The young man was "abducted" by two coeds, duct taped, and painted blue, if I remember what the newspapers said. Is that all of it? And, more importantly, did he object? Fight? Cry for help? Or did he go along with it.
The laws against hazing are there to protect people from getting hurt. In the past people have been seriously injured or even killed as a result of hazing. On the other hand, the only real pain I see in this one is when someone rips the duct tape off. That stuff really sticks.
No charges have been filed in the death.
The university president has called for a "task force" to look into hazing practices. Well and good. We're facing a huge financial crisis and we still have time to worry about painting people blue.
The tragedy of the young man's death is already sinking beneath the froth of hazing charges. Those charged, by the way, have pleaded innocent. Now, if I were a lawyer for one of the people charged, and the city had a really good case, I'd recommend pleading down to a slap on the wrist and getting it over with. If, on the other hand, the city's case was lousy, I might recommend pleading innocent and fighting it out in court.
One wonders about all the fuss and bother. I simply can't see why so much of our resources are being spent on a bubble. On the other hand, I don't have all the information I need to make an informed guess, as I'm limited to what I get from the paper.

Death by Vodka

The local newspaper had another story today about the young man who died of alcohol poisoning a few weeks ago. Seems like he was "kidnapped" by a couple of sorority girls, duct taped up, painted blue, and offered vodka to drink. Indictments are to be handed down: the fraternity and the sorority will be arrested for felony hazing, there will be a gaggle of arrests for hazing and for providing alcohol to a minor.
A number of things emerge from the murk that surrounds the story. First, the fraternity and the sorority had apparently knowledge of the hazing. If so, this is stupid almost beyond belief. Second, the young man was not forced to drink. He was offered liquor. Different thing entirely. Third, it turns out that the young man had a history, albeit not a long one, of binge drinking.
Taken altogether, it seems that the hazing incident and the death from drinking are only tenuously connected. That is, the young man apparently did all the drinking on his own hook, and might have killed himself at another time. It happens.
So, what about the hazing, that people are being arrested for it? It seems to consist of the "capture" of a strong, aware, alert, young man by two young women. Second, the program included stripping the young man to his shorts, painting him (it is to be hoped) Aggie blue, duct taping him, and letting him drink himself to oblivion.
One if tempted to ask, "What would have happened if the young man had not died?" The answer is, probably, nothing. No charges, no arrests, no really screwed up lives.
Hazing is a dumb activity. It can be dangerous. It can be fatal. However, in this case, it was only dumb. Certainly one would not choose to be duct taped and painted blue. The kidnapping is a little more problematical; I don't think I'd mind that.
It's the death that has engendered this lust for justice (read "revenge"). The boy died; somebody has to pay.
The charges brought against the people involved are "just." That is to say, they are within the purview of the law. It's the motive behind all this that is a little unsettling. That and the fact that the newspaper hasn't remarked at all on the evolution of the story as more and more facts come out.

When are you dead?

Psychologists note that we tend to make sharp divisions among items arranged in a spectrum. Suppose, for instance, that we have an array of drinking vessels, with what is clearly a mug on the left and what is clearly a glass on the right. From left to right, the intervening vessels become less mug-like and more glass-like. Am I making sense? Okay, at some point, I am going to say, "The ones from here on," gesturing to the right, "are glasses." At some point, you are going to say the same. The catch is that we will probably not make the choice at the same point. However, the choices we make are firm. They call it "discrete perceptual discontinuities." What a grand phrase that is.

We could, at that time, spend a few hours defending our choices and ridiculing the choices of others, and nothing would be lost but time. Except. The same tendency exhibits itself in any situation where a spectrum of possibilities exists. When are we viable entities? In the womb? At the moment of birth? When do we die? How much radiation risk is too much?

We are not happy with fuzzy answers to many of life's questions, so we set firm boundaries. And that's the problem. We assume all along that those boundaries are natural ones. They aren't. We don't discover boundaries; we create them. There is no magical moment when a person becomes alive or when a person becomes not alive. There's a fuzzy area between and someone, sometime, has to decide just where the boundary is. Sort of like in a football game when the referee runs up to a pile of players and plants his foot. That place is where the ball belongs. Not that the ball is really there, but because the ref has made the decision.

Or, to pursue the sports analogy further, remember the old story of the three umpires talking? The first says, "Some is strikes and some is balls, and I calls them the way they is." The second one says, "Some is strikes and some is balls, and I calls them the way I sees them." The third (it's always the third) says, "Some is strikes and some is balls, but they aint nothing till I calls them." Now, this is not a vindication of Schroedinger's cat, nor evidence of how reality flexes, but simply an illustration of how we make decisions about how events should be punctuated.

The problem is, obviously, that we kill each other over where events should be punctuated. Doesn't seem right, does it? A sane world would discuss costs and benefits for decisions such as "Should we have nuclear power?" or "When should we allow an abortion?" or "When can we terminate the life of a person?" If we keep in mind the rights of a human (which are not, T. Jefferson to the contrary, inalienable), the needs of society, and the future of the planet, we might come to some sort of rational policy set. Of course, the minute we try it, someone will say that god has told him to blow us up for blasphemy. Sigh.