No "good death"

I have been absolutely sickened by the news coming out of Britain. It's just horrible. My daughter and I have started avoiding British news and programming because of the euthanasia drive. I know we shouldn't, that we should actively confront this monster on the global scale, but there is so much bigotry, so little understanding of disability--where to start? How to get it through people's heads? It's a kind of terrorism directed at the disabled, I think. More of us have been openly identifying as disabled who in the past would have denied it and tried to hide it. We've experienced relief in doing so, and found solidarity with our brothers and sisters who are unable to disguise their differences at all. And here the bullying able-bodied world wants to shame everyone again, to clear their days of any interaction with openly disabled people. It will be those with learning disabilities and neurological problems and bad joints pretending that they don't need any accomodations, so they can keep their jobs. It will be those in wheelchairs, in braces, those who are deaf or blind, cloistered behind drawn curtains so no one has to have visual reminder of disability. And those already largely housebound pressured to submit to the ultimate exclusion, euthanasia. And once it is a common place to kill those who require nursing care, the next level of social "burden" will be targeted. None of us are safe in a culture where the answer to weakness is death.

Pro-euthanasia advocates insist that they would never pressure anyone into committing suicide. But they lie. Their language, as William Peace shows,  reveals how they routinely devalue and disparage the lives of people with disabilities.  Daniel James's parents are excellent examples, saying that their paralyzed son, along with disabled people in general, are "second class citizens." Since when is the solution to a problem of second class citizenship euthanasia? I'll tell you when! The Indian Wars! Oh, those poor Indians, losing their land and culture. Let's kill them off toot-sweet and put them out of our misery. It's a veritable final solution to the issue, one might say as one goose-stepped along. 

Euthanasia advocates also purposely muddy the waters, appealing to people's wish to resolve the suffering of loved ones who are truly dying in distress in order to get assisted suicide legalized. Thus British television viewers were given the opportunity to witness a disabled man said to be at the end of his life kill himself at a Swiss clinic while talk still swirls about Daniel James, who was not terminal. Disability does not mean dying, but if the euthanasia advocates get their way, it will soon.