…on’t feel offended if no one wants to read biographical info. 😉 Here – mostly – is what I wrote ten years ago: My stories tend to reflect both my life and my thought processes. Linearity is not one of the major themes in my life. Peter Knoblock, my advisor as a masters student, gifted me with the term “divergent thinker” – “divergent” tends to characterize my life and stories like this as well. In 1990, the movie Awakenings came out. I was on brea…
…ks apart the complicated relationship between assisted suicide and the mostly-undefined concept of “dignity.” Below is an an excerpt from “Death with dignity devalues disability.” What does it mean to die with dignity? Or the opposite, what is death without dignity or with indignity? There is no legal definition. It is a phrase people like to use with the hope that it is sufficient and accepted. Remember the bit George Carlin did in 1992 about eup…
…it fairly openly so someone who’s a person with disabilities like John Kelly – who is on the call – if he were considered competent he could simply be euthanized, if it were approved by a doctor. The concept with this I have an issue with is about choice, because it’s not always about choice. It’s often about people in a difficult time of their life and their being – they feel because of the system and because of what’s going on or because of oth…
…n, conducting assisted suicides using lethal drugs, with two thirds of his body count being people who were not terminally ill. As before, the difference between being disabled and dying was not recognized or considered relevant. As before, the difficulties disabled individuals faced in living – community access, getting a job, getting married – were not considered, or worse, accepted as rationales for ending their lives. To read the whole op-ed,…
…nger of being coerced into assisted suicide because our lives are more likely to be devalued, especially if we are living in poverty and denied quality healthcare and palliative care. Although there are difficulties in organizing because of perceptions, people of color must reach out to our states’ Black, Puerto Rican, Hispanic and Asian caucuses and members of the legislature to talk about the dangers of doctor assisted suicide to our communities…
