I was just on another thread where they were talking about ventilators, etc., to keep an 85 year old man alive and the family of that man felt it was wrong to take him off man-made life support. Your comment is exactly what I pondered about those who judge so harshly those who do not believe in taking "heroic efforts" (so to speak) towards those who would have died without man-made interference. Carry on...... :)
It isn’t that I don’t believe we should do all we can to save lives. It is a hard decision when you have someone on life support and it is clear they aren’t going to get better. The problem I have is that is a fuzzy line. People do recover inexplicably from comas. Miracles do happen.
I was totally against the Terri Schiavo decision because though she may have been beyond recovery she could breathe and function on her own without a machine and sometimes react and her parents loved her and wanted to take care of her. I’ve never been convinced of the better off dead mantra. Better for whom is what I ask? If one is a vegetable incapable of consciousness then the idea of better or worse really goes out the window.
That said I worry about society being prompted to provide the means to prop up what are spurious rights made up to serve convenience. Rights should be centered on what you can do with your own means to live your life. We shouldn’t be creating rights that are not derived from nature and require other people’s money to provide. A right to bear arms ties into a natural right to defend oneself within their own means. A right to bear arms that involves other people’s money to distribute weapons to everyone in a misguided attempt to get rid of any inequality of arms.
So much of the attempts to remove inequalities in society are a game of catching sand. There is usually a good reason why one does not have what they don’t have and it almost never is simply because someone has kept them down. The problem is that even if someone indeed did play an active role this can not be solved by someone else propping them up. If a person doesn’t have the skills to earn money then guaranteeing them money without them developing the skills to make it is like pouring water into a bucket with a very big hole in it.
This is where the left have a core flaw in their ideology. They seem to believe that the people at the bottom arrived at and stay their by no fault of their own. They totally ignore the countless individuals who rise from the depths of poverty and work hard and make a life for themselves. Instead of calling these people to hope and faith in themselves to be better they call them to hope and faith in staying exactly where they are only with a government benefit to prop them up.
Socially we have created a whole slew of irrational rights.
Abortion is one of them and now we are starting to see as abortion clinics have shut down and less and less doctors wish to become abortionists that now attempts are being made to force doctors to be trained as abortionists. Just wait until universal health care comes then Doctors will be forced to perform them or lose their medical licenses.
Rights propped up are almost always rights that infringe on the rights and welfare of others. Even good intentioned rights like those provided by the disabilities act are burdensome. The next thing you know there will be requirements for changing stations in every department store. (Though most have done this voluntarily with out government order)
I am not convinced that good intentions could not be accomplished by less oppressive means but “There ought to be a Law!” crowd doesn’t thing about asking others politely to consider their plight. They instead go to the government to force their will and the support of their “rights” on others.