It used to be that you could get somewhere by saying things like “To take your point of view to its logical conclusion, you'd be endorsing extermination camps,” or compulsory sterilization, or euthanasia, or the Thought Police, or whatever horror it seems every reasonable person would want to exclude.
But that move doesn't work any more. Now there are Republicans who come out and say what they think in their heart of hearts. There are even some who are in a position to act on these moral intuitions.
Exhibit A: Andre Bauer, who now says he was misunderstood and “regrets” his choice of “metaphor.”
-- South Carolina Lieutenant Governor Andre Bauer, Jan. 22, 2010
After exposure to the Bauer policy, it's a bit of a jolt to read an advice story like this one, putting “poor people” or “unlucky people” in place of the nouns “dog” and “cat.”
Exhibit B: the governor of Florida now says the state's hospitals are “at capacity” and can't take any more Haitian earthquake victims. I'm sure the people who express noisy approval of this measure would be the first to apply for FEMA grants if their second homes or pleasure boats were wrecked by a hurricane.
I don't have the figures at hand, but the number of doctors and hospital beds in Florida is probably two hundred times what Haiti possessed even before the earthquake. It's need that should be driving decisions, not ability to pay-- I can bet that if Governor Crist were an inch or two from death, he would care about getting quick and good care, and not insist on its being cheap.
Put these two stories together and you get a summary picture of the contemporary American mind at work. Or for more detail, if you can stand the haphazard spelling and call-in radio-show factoids, browse the comment threads on any website discussing them. You would think that the greatest danger to our civilization is kids getting free lunches at school, and not a financial system equipped with a special casino floor for high-rollers, and not our simultaneous fighting of several wars, at least one of them undertaken for reasons of pure executive vanity.
Respectable people love to talk about “responsibility.” This “stray cat” and “no capacity” nonsense allows people to sound like they're being responsible and planning for the future, when, on closer inspection, they turn out to be planning for a future that includes themselves and pushes others off the cliff. There's the genocide that depends on somebody doing something, and the genocide that depends on nobody doing anything. Tell me how much the difference matters to the sufferers.
Isn't euthanasia a little different? And isn't population regulation not necessarily equivalent to such draconian measures as forced sterilization, and thus also in a different category? Silly quibbles.
Surely not to treat everyone who suffers in any way, everywhere, with what surcease [unsure if that's the word] of that suffering and compassion one can is, quite simply, inhuman? Or at least exceedingly uncivil which is, perhaps, worse.
That many Americans are so frightened by any ideas that can be branded as ... I was going to say “left-wing” but instead will use, unredacted, ... 'liberal' is a source of constant amazement! If someone needs help in order that their suffering be lessened, surely any civilized person gives what help they can? Not because they are obliged to but because they are human and they are civilized.
This entry should come with a health warning. Do not click on the word 'misunderstood.' If you do you'll have to endure some really quite outrageously bigoted matter.
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