I wanted to give one resource on the "cutting us out of the herd" front. Wesley Smith wrote a book called "Forced Exit" which traces the issue of assisted suicide from the standpoint of what is already going on in hospitals across the nation.
I quote Smith in my book, and have written a warning about the perils of an economic order which is eliminating all of no use to building more wealth. The costly, the nonprofitable, the unproductive, those of no use to capital. These are a few words about that:
"At the end of the 20th century the corporate state is busily unloading everything perceived as no use to building more wealth: private managed-care corporations are usurping public health care; "free" market happy-faced Orwellian "opportunity" is replacing public entitlements; and mutual fund privateers threaten Social Security promising that they can deliver "security"(for a price of course) while the poor may be wedged out of retirement security. The Social Security Administration is paring down disability while the government puts Medicare and Medicaid on the road to rationing. As the government devolves national standards, a citizen's right to redress social wrongs is imperilled with curtailment. Job security disappears as corporate profits soar. The prison business booms while the social contract...contracts.
When banks control monetary policy and global corporations control government policies, the "economy" is raised to highest esteem, "efficiency" the goal. Under corporate governance a person's "worth" is measured by his/her dollar value to the Gross Domestic Product (as previously noted, disabled people are "worth" more to the GDP as a slot in a nursing home bringing in $50,000 a year than we are living in our own homes). The horrible end result is a society that reduces personhood to a commodity, diminishing human dignity and eroding the human substance of the culture.
The peril of an economy-inspired system is that it automatically sheds through its "efficient" workings all of no use to generate capital. In our discard society the irrelevant "surplus" population (which is an immoral nomenclature) for whom there are no jobs, the disabled who cannot work or cannot get jobs, the sick and the elderly who dare to live too long, the poor children who can not vote are increasingly abandoned by the corporate state.
Assisted suicide becomes the hot social issue while correcting grossly inadequate socio/economic policy -- such as the lack of universal health care -- remains back-burnered, off the agenda. Medical costs skyrocket placing adequate care out of financial reach for millions, but the health corporations' stockholders' dividends rally upwards. Congress targets the ban on Medicaid assisted-suicide for reversal while Medicaid is on the chopping block for cuts. Corporate-controlled medicine makes people "worth" more dead from assisted suicide, because treatment siphons off profit dollars from the HMOs.
What effect does this have on the citizenry? This surge of monied power is about more than building excessive wealth for the few, it is also about building more social control over the many. When collective security is threatened, individual fear increases. The reduction of the social safety net breeds an increasingly desperate population which retreats into individualistic concerns, because the message people get is that to survive they must be ever focused on acquiring money. "
Now I have to get some work done to put food on the table.
Marta Russell