The path towards mercy killing and euthanasia is opening up - death will become us as our misery provides the justification. Is this what you want:
A private charity operates mobile euthanasia units, which travel from one care home to another – door-to-door – to help anyone to die who has been denied the opportunity by a doctor. They only visit each home once a week to relieve the potential psychological burden – but it must still be quite a shock when a group of smiling nurses turn up at your door and politely ask if you'd like to die today.
What science fiction writers of the past imagined as a fantastical reflection on the lack of humanity of their contemporary society has become concrete reality in ours. If you want, we can now kill you in an afternoon. Belgium and the Netherlands list "death" among their accepted forms of medical therapy, performed with a chilling bureaucratic efficiency that has the effect of making it all appear perfectly normal and entirely routine. What was once forced upon people by authoritarian regimes is now becoming vogue by means of the ballot box. Societies are shuffling towards a culture of death. Willingly.
It is but a short step from ending a miserable life to ending the burden on society. We get ever closer to a world where the inconveniently old or ill are quietly disposed of, guided across the Styx by a little pin prick.
Dreadful.
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1 comment:
For some time now I have been trying to write a future-dystopia called 'Panoptica'. One of the premises was that nobody ever died. The old and fatally injured (and the inconvenient) were given 'early retirement' and shipped out of town. They accept it gladly because they think there is a retirement utopia, but it's not...
What is causing me most problems with this story, which should be fiction, is that real life is overtaking me faster than I can write.
Maybe I'll write it as a documentary.
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