My Experience With the Death Panels
Well, the death panels are back. The lying, corrupt, hateful liars who make up the Republican party and its sucker followers are screaming their heads off again, repeating the biggest, most malicious lie of 2010.
I try to avoid anything personal on my blog, because I want it to be about something more important than me. I am going to make an exception this time, because this is a lie too abominable to let it stand unchallenged.
Over the last few years, my mother, my wife's mother and her aunt have died, all in their mid-90's. When our parents were dealing with their parents' mortality, this would have been remarkable. It was a rare thing for people to live beyond 90, and experience deterioration of a kind that would have been very uncommon a few decades ago. Now it is becoming a frequent occurrence.
We really knew almost nothing about this process and how to deal with it. This is where the "death panels" come in. Thanks to our government, there were people there to help us understand what was happening, and what was possible to do about it. Without them, I don't have a clue how we would have been able to make many of the difficult decisions we had to make. Furthermore, there was the hospice program, again brought to us by our government, and the subject of endless right wing abuse. What did this program mean to our parents? It meant that they were able to die at home, not in a hospital or nursing home. It meant that they were able to live out the end stage of their lives in some semblance of dignity.
Dying with dignity is, apparently, one more thing that the Republican party intends to reserve for the rich.
There is simply no end to the barbarism of the right in this country. When common human decency interferes with the working of their greed, their inhumanity is boundless. On behalf of my mother, my wife's mother and aunt, the 88 year old lady next door who is entering this stage of her life, and all of the other people like them, who are no longer able to speak for themselves, I will never forget the existence of the miserable excuses for human beings that exist in this country, who care not a shred for anything but themselves, and who will gladly tolerate any amount of suffering in others if they think they can find a way to profit from other people's misery.
I try to avoid anything personal on my blog, because I want it to be about something more important than me. I am going to make an exception this time, because this is a lie too abominable to let it stand unchallenged.
Over the last few years, my mother, my wife's mother and her aunt have died, all in their mid-90's. When our parents were dealing with their parents' mortality, this would have been remarkable. It was a rare thing for people to live beyond 90, and experience deterioration of a kind that would have been very uncommon a few decades ago. Now it is becoming a frequent occurrence.
We really knew almost nothing about this process and how to deal with it. This is where the "death panels" come in. Thanks to our government, there were people there to help us understand what was happening, and what was possible to do about it. Without them, I don't have a clue how we would have been able to make many of the difficult decisions we had to make. Furthermore, there was the hospice program, again brought to us by our government, and the subject of endless right wing abuse. What did this program mean to our parents? It meant that they were able to die at home, not in a hospital or nursing home. It meant that they were able to live out the end stage of their lives in some semblance of dignity.
Dying with dignity is, apparently, one more thing that the Republican party intends to reserve for the rich.
There is simply no end to the barbarism of the right in this country. When common human decency interferes with the working of their greed, their inhumanity is boundless. On behalf of my mother, my wife's mother and aunt, the 88 year old lady next door who is entering this stage of her life, and all of the other people like them, who are no longer able to speak for themselves, I will never forget the existence of the miserable excuses for human beings that exist in this country, who care not a shred for anything but themselves, and who will gladly tolerate any amount of suffering in others if they think they can find a way to profit from other people's misery.
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Happy New Year.