Assisted Suicide Eviction
Can you blame them? The housing association where the Swiss assisted suicide organization Dignitas maintains a death apartment, has evicted the group because other residents are sick of the suicide parade.It is a familiar sight for the residents of Zurich's Getrud Strasse number 84. Three or four times a week, during office hours, an ambulance pulls up in front of the unassuming dirty grey housing block. A body is carried out of the building in a charcoal-coloured sack. Often the tenants meet it propped up vertically in the lift on the way down, or in the narrow corridor, before it is placed in the vehicle and driven away.
What a surrealistic scene--perhaps even more than Kevorkian helping extinguish people in his rusty van.
Yet as awful as that depiction is, the reaction of one of the tenents is, to me, even more disturbing:
Gloria Sonny, 55, who has lived in the building for six years - or, as she calls it, "under the same roof as death"--headed a petition calling for Dignitas to go. "I'm not against assisted suicide," she said, "but this is a place where people live. It's the wrong place to help people die. I don't see why I should pay with the quality of my life because Switzerland deals with the topic in a more liberal way than other countries."How twisted we have become: Sure, go ahead and help kill them, just don't make me have to look. For someone my age, who remembers society's once unequivocal support forShe said the building smelt of death and that she suffered nightmares that she would be forced into one of the "death flats" against her will and made to drink a fatal cocktail.
suicide prevention rather than facilitation, this whole story is almost unimaginable. But the times they are a changing, as Dylan had it, and not necessarily for the better. Unless we reject the terminal nonjudmentalism--illustrated so vividly by Ms. Sonny--that is increasingly permeating society, one day cities might begin issuing zoning permits for euthanasia clinics--think E.G. Robinson going "home" in Soylent Green. After all, it isn't the killing that is wrong: It is the poor aesthetics.Labels: Swiss Assisted Suicide
posted by Wesley J. Smith @ 8:50 AM
2 Comments
2 Comments:
Are you surprised? NIMBY is rampant. I imagine you're just as guilty as me and the Swiss woman.
I favor nuclear power and drug legalization as policy objectives, that doesn't mean I want to live next to a nuclear plant or methadone tx facility.
I'll live next to a nuclear plant, especially if I can get other people to be sufficiently rational not to consider my house of poor value because it's next to a nuclear power plant. But I demand that I get the benefit from it of having much lower home heating and cooling bills!
I don't favor drug legalization, so I don't have to worry about that one. And of course, some things _are_ fine in one place and not in another. People have to have garbage dumps somewhere, but that doesn't have to mean you want to live next to one.
But let's face it, this woman feels unhappy about all of this for reasons that obtain only because deep down she's sickened by the thing. Note that she's having nightmares about being killed herself. I think that's telling. This is more than just a matter of aesthetics, however much she might insist that's all it is.
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