Massachusetts

this business of life is all about. What is the purpose of life and when is it effectively over, whether or not physical functions are still working?

We now have all these heroic (and expensive, btw) ways of keeping the body "alive" and to what end if the mind of that body cannot appreciate it? I have been through situations in my own family where the deaths were inevitable and in clear view, but some insisted on keeping the patients alive-- every minute of life was somehow sacred.

And how does all this fit into our common history? Throughout most of it we have readily gone to war, and numbers like 25 to 30,000,000 dead Soviet troops and citizens become just numbers, not people. We know all about Nazi death camps and experiments, but not that much about Japanese unit 731. Closer to home, Andersonville and Tuskegee. The Belgian Congo.

We can be an extremely cruel species, and it is ironic that we can decry the death penalty or the "right to die" while ignoring all the other death around us.