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When you ride ALONE you ride with bin Laden | 1, 2, 3
Eye On the Ball
 EFORE 9/11, our government got involved in protecting us from all sorts of hazards, from the Budweiser frog to asbestos, from road rage to Internet porn and Bill Clinton's penis. And by watching the nightly news, you'd think the greatest threat to our personal safety was either shark attacks or mold. But then came our 9/11 "wake-up call," and everything...
Please. If everything changed, how come we're still fighting the old, stupid wars alongside the real war? Why are decent citizens still being jailed for smoking the wrong plant, easing the suffering of the terminally ill, or accepting cash for sex instead of the customary dinner and drinks?
Politicians love to talk about the wisdom of the people in their ass-kissing stump speeches, but apparently these wise people are not even smart enough to decide when they can die. Which is ironic, because the two things that bring the most wisdom in life are pain and age -- and most people who want to end it usually have plenty of both. How annoying it must be for such people, old and in pain, to have young, arrogant "lawmakers" making life and death decisions for them.
Why are decent citizens still being jailed for smoking the wrong plant, easing the suffering of the terminally ill, or accepting cash for sex instead of the customary dinner and drinks?
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The adult, right-minded patients requesting physician-assisted suicides are not victims of their doctors, they're victims of their illnesses. The doctors are humanely facilitating the inevitable, helping those dying in agony to make their exit with dignity, either by providing prescription medication, or the old-fashioned way, by showing them the bill. We wouldn't think of allowing our pets or racehorses to needlessly suffer before an inescapable death. Why not be just as "humane" to people? Isn't the choice to accept death with dignity a precious personal freedom and a far cry better than sitting in a Craftmatic adjustable bed with a tube in your nose trying to eat a puzzle?
Which brings me to the Nimitzes. In early 2002, Chester W. Nimitz, Jr., son of the famed World War II admiral and a highly decorated admiral in his own right, killed himself in a double suicide with his wife, Joan, in what I like to call the Irrefutable Argument for Assisted Suicide.
The Nimitzes had everything: a good life, honors and real honor, a loving marriage, good kids -- everything that defines a happy life for most people. And then they didn't, because they got old. Robust into their 80s, at some point the body goes -- it just does. It's not designed for forever. Life became a chore of just staying alive, and that's no life at all. Maybe if the Nimitzes had led dull, inactive lives, like the weenies who write stupid laws, then the transition to droolitude wouldn't have been so hard to take. But they lived, so just hanging on wasn't an option. They had lost their mobility, then their health, and finally, most sadly, the remote.
They told the kids their plans, said the key good-byes, put all their affairs in absolutely apple-pie order, and then shuffled off their mortal coil together, quietly and with dignity. Having led a good life, they weren't afraid to die. Spiritual people never are. It's the religious who are more often afraid to bring on the after-party. Then they project that fear on others, like the Nimitzes, who would have been stopped if they had gotten so infirm they couldn't do it themselves.
Mr. President, and everyone else there in Washington, get your noses out of our personal affairs. Stop trying to police the private, adult decisions we make in our bedrooms, our doctors' offices or section 29, row L of a Nelly concert. Read the Enquirer, do something else to scratch that itch. Get a life. You have a big, big job now, and frankly, you're not so good you can do it distracted.
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